Albert Gleizes | |
|---|---|
 Albert Gleizes,c. 1920 | |
| Born | Albert Léon Gleizes (1881-12-08)8 December 1881 Paris, France |
| Died | 23 June 1953(1953-06-23) (aged 71) Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France |
| Known for | Painting, writing |
| Notable work |
|
| Movement | Cubism,Abstract art,Abstraction-Création |
| Spouse | |
Albert Gleizes (French:[albɛʁɡlɛz]; 8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953) was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder ofCubism and an influence on theSchool of Paris. Albert Gleizes andJean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism,Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of theSection d'Or group of artists. He was also a member ofDer Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at theBauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware ofmodern art. He was a member of theSociety of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in theAbbaye de Créteil.[1] Gleizes exhibited regularly atLéonce Rosenberg'sGalerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director ofAbstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, e.g.,La Peinture et ses lois (Paris, 1923),Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris, 1932) andHomocentrisme (Sablons, 1937).[2]
Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised inParis, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. He was also the nephew ofLéon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearbyMontmartre cemetery. Finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army (Abbeville, Picardie) then began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in theImpressionist tradition. His first landscapes from aroundCourbevoie appear particularly inspired byAlfred Sisley orCamille Pissarro.[3] Although clearly related to Pissarro in technique, Gleizes' particular view-points as well as the composition and conception of early works represent a clear departure from the style of late Impressionism. The density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were often noted by early critics.[1]
Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titledLa Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In 1905 Gleizes was among the founders ofl'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of theSection littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1906), Gleizes exhibitedJour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into aPost-Impressionist style with strongNaturalist andSymbolist components.[3]
Gleizes and others decided to create anassociation fraternelle d'artistes and rent a large house in Créteil. TheAbbaye de Créteil was a self-supporting community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with other painters, poets, musicians and writers, gathered to create. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to 7 rue du Delta nearMontmartre, Paris, with artistsAmedeo Modigliani,Henri Doucet [fr], Maurice Drouart and Geo Printemps.[4]
In 1908 Gleizes exhibited at theToison d'Or inMoscow. The same year, showing a great interest in color and reflecting the transient influence ofFauvism, the work of Gleizes became more synthetic with aproto-Cubist component.[5][6]
Gleizes' Fauve-like period was very brief, lasting several months, and even when his paint was thickest and color brightest, his concern for structural rhythms and simplification was dominant. His geometric simplifications at this time were more akin toPont-Aven School andLes Nabis principles than toPaul Cézanne. His landscapes of 1909 are characterized by the reducing of forms of nature to primary shapes.[1]
During the summer of the same year his style became linear and stripped, broken down into multiple forms and facets with attenuated colors, close to that of the painterHenri Le Fauconnier. In 1910 a group began to form which included Gleizes, Metzinger,Fernand Léger andRobert Delaunay. They met regularly at Henri le Fauconnier's studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Boulevard de Montparnasse. These soirées would often included writers such asGuillaume Apollinaire,Roger Allard [fr],René Arcos [fr],Paul Fort,Pierre-Jean Jouve,Alexandre Mercereau,Jules Romains andAndré Salmon.[3] Together with other young painters, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color. From 1910 onwards, Albert Gleizes was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and a principal theorist of the movement.[5][6]
Gleizes' involvement in Cubism saw him exhibit at the twenty-sixthSalon des Indépendants in 1910. He showed hisPortrait de René Arcos andL'Arbre, two paintings in which the emphasis on simplified form had already begun to overwhelm the representational interest of the paintings. The same tendency is evident in Jean Metzinger'sPortrait of Apollinaire in the same Salon.[5] WhenLouis Vauxcelles wrote his initial review of the Salon, he made a passing and imprecise reference to Gleizes,Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger andHenri le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes."[7]
Guillaume Apollinaire, in his account of the same salon at theGrand Palais (inL'Intransigeant, 18 March 1910)[8] remarked "with joy" that the general sense of the exhibition signifies "La déroute de l'impressionnisme," in reference to the works of a conspicuous group of artists (Gleizes, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Metzinger,André Lhote andMarie Laurencin).[9][10] In Gleizes' paintings of the crucial year 1910, writesDaniel Robbins, "we see the artist's volumetric approach to Cubism and his successful union of a broad field of vision with a flat picture plane. [...] The effort to grasp the intricate rhythms of a panorama resulted in a comprehensive geometry of intersecting and overlapping forms which created a new and more dynamic quality of movement.[1]
Gleizes exhibited at the 1910Salon d'Automne with the same artists, followed by the first organized group showing by Cubists, inSalle 41 of the 1911Salon des Indépendants (La Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox)) together with Metzinger, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger. The result was a public scandal which brought Cubism for the first time to the attention of the general public (in contrast,Picasso andBraque were exhibiting in a private gallery and selling to a small circle of connoisseurs). In a review of the 1911 Indépendants published in Le Petit Parisien (23 April 1911), critic Jean Claude writes:
At the 1911 Salon d'Automne (room 8), Gleizes exhibited hisPortrait de Jacques Nayral andLa Chasse (The Hunt), with, in addition to the group ofSalle 41,André Lhote,Marcel Duchamp,Jacques Villon,Roger de La Fresnaye andAndré Dunoyer de Segonzac. In the fall of that year, though the intermediary of Apollinaire, he metPablo Picasso for the first time and joined thePuteaux Group which held meetings in the studio ofJacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp) and also included Villon's brothers,Raymond Duchamp-Villon andMarcel Duchamp, amongst others. Many of these artists also frequented the cafés Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole in Montparnasse.[3]
People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances. (Albert Gleizes, on the Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1911)[12]
Gleizes exhibited hisLes Baigneuses (The Bathers) at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants; a show marked by Marcel Duchamp'sNude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which itself caused a scandal even amongst the Cubists (Duchamp removed the painting before the opening of the exhibition). This was followed by a group show at theGaleries Dalmau inBarcelona, the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain,[13][14] another exhibit in Moscow (Valet de Carreau), theSalon de la Société Normande in Rouen, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, October 1912 at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris.[3]
From 1911 through 1912, drawing to some extent on theories ofHenri Poincaré,Ernst Mach,Charles Henry andHenri Bergson, Gleizes began to representthe object, no longer considered from a specific point of view, but rebuilt following a selection of successive viewpoints (i.e., as if viewed simultaneously from numerous viewpoints, and in four-dimensions). This technique ofrelative motion is pushed to its highest degree of complexity in the monumentalLe Dépiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing) (1912). This ambitious work, with Delaunay'sLa Ville de Paris (City of Paris), is one of the largest paintings in the history of Cubism.
At the Salon d'Automne of 1912 Gleizes exhibitedL'Homme au Balcon (Man on a Balcony), now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[15] The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such barbaric art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat.[5][16] Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defence of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitledDu "Cubisme" (published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913).[17]
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InDu "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger wrote: "If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain ofRiemann's theorems." Cubism itself, then, was not based on any geometrical theory, but corresponded better tonon-Euclidean geometry than classical orEuclidean geometry. The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective; an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension.[18] Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself."[5]In contrast to Picasso and Braque, Gleizes' intent was not to analyze and describe visual reality. Gleizes had argued that we cannot know the external world, we can only know oursensations.[5] Objects from daily life⎯guitar, pipe or bowl of fruit⎯ did not satisfy his complex idealistic concepts of the physical world. His subjects were of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning. Gleizes' iconography (as of Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger) helps to explain why there is no period in his work corresponding to analytic Cubism, and how it was possible for Gleizes to become an abstract painter, more theoretically in tune with Kandinsky and Mondrian than Picasso and Braque, who remained associated with visual reality.[1]
Gleizes' intent was to reconstitute and synthesize the real world according to his individual consciousness (sensations), through the use of volumes to convey the solidity and structure of objects. Their weight, placement and effects upon each other, and the inseparability of form and color, was one of the principal lessons of Cézanne. Forms were simplified and distorted, each shape and color modified by another, rather than splintered. His concern was to establish weight, density and volumetric relationships among sections of a broad subject. Gleizes himself characterized the 1910–11 phase of his work as an "analysis of volume relationships," though it bears little relation to the traditional use of the word "analytical" in our understanding of Cubism.[1]
"We laugh out loud when we think of all the novices who expiate their literal understanding of the remarks of a cubist and their faith in absolute truth by laboriously placing side by side the six faces of a cube and both ears of a model seen in profile." (Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger)[12]
A central theme ofDu "Cubisme" was that access to the true essence of the world could be gained bysensations alone. The sensation offered by classical painting was very limited: to only one point of view, from a single point in space and frozen in time. But the real world is mobile, both spatially and temporally. Classical perspective and the formulations of Euclidean geometry were onlyconventions (to use Poincaré's term) that distance us from the truth of our sensations, from the truth of our own human nature. Man sees the world of natural phenomena from a multitude of angles that form a continuum of sensations in perpetual and continuous change. The Cubists' aim was to completely eschew absolute space and time in favor of relative motion, to grasp through sensory appearances and translate onto a flat canvas the dynamical properties of thefour-dimensional manifold (the natural world). Only then could one achieve a better representation of the mobile reality of our living experience. If Gleizes and Metzinger write in Du "Cubisme" that we can only know our sensations, it is not because they wish to disregard them, but, on the contrary, to understand them more deeply as the primary source for their own work. In reasoning this way, Gleizes and Metzinger demonstrate that they are successors to Cézanne, who insists that everything must be learnt from nature: "Nature seen and nature felt... both of which must unite in order to endure."[5][19][20]
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In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of European modern art to an American audience at theArmory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) inNew York City,Chicago andBoston. In addition toMan on a balcony (l'Homme au Balcon) no. 196, Gleizes exhibited at the Armory Show his 1910Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[21][22]
Gleizes published an article inRicciotto Canudo'sMontjoie! entitled "Cubisme et la tradition". It was through the intermediary of Canudo that Gleizes would meet the artistJuliette Roche; a childhood friend ofJean Cocteau and daughter ofJules Roche, an influential politician of the 3rd Republic.[3]
With the outbreak ofWorld War I, Albert Gleizes re-enlisted in the French army. He was put in charge of organizing entertainment for the troops and as a result was approached by Jean Cocteau to design the set and costumes for theWilliam Shakespeare play,A Midsummer Night's Dream, along withGeorges Valmier.[3]
Discharged from the military in the fall of 1915, Gleizes and his new wife, Juliette Roche, moved to New York, where they would meet regularly withFrancis Picabia,Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp andJean Crotti (who would eventually marrySuzanne Duchamp). It is at this time that Gleizes witnessed, with a critical eye, thereadymades of Marcel Duchamp. After a short stay at the Albemarle Hotel Gleizes and his wife settled at 103 West Street, where Gleizes painted a series of works inspired by jazz music, skyscrapers, luminous signs and theBrooklyn Bridge. Here Gleizes metStuart Davis,Max Weber,Joseph Stella, and participated in a show at Montross Gallery with Duchamp, Crotti and Metzinger (who remained in Paris)[3]
From New York City, the couple sailed toBarcelona where they were joined byMarie Laurencin,Francis Picabia and his wife. The group spent the summer painting at the resort area ofTossa de Mar and in November Gleizes opened his firstsolo exhibition, at theGaleries Dalmau in Barcelona, 29 November – 12 December 1916.[23] Returning to New York city in 1917, Gleizes began writing poetic sketches in verse and in prose, some of which were published in Picabia'sDada periodical391. Both Gleizes and his wife traveled from New York toBermuda in September 1917,[24] where he painted a number of landscapes. When the war in Europe ended they returned to France where his career evolved more towards teaching through writing and he became involved with the committee of theUnions Intellectuelles Françaises.[3][5]
During the winter of 1918 at the Gleizes' rented house in Pelham New York, writes Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes came to his wife and said, "A terrible thing has happened to me: I believe I am finding God." This new religious conviction resulted not from any mystical visions but instead from Gleizes' rational confrontation of three urgent problems: collective order, individual differences and the painter's role. Although Gleizes did not join the Church until 1941, his next twenty-five years were spent in a logical effort not only to find God but also to have faith.[1]
From 1914 and extending to the end of the New York period, Gleizes' nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."[1] Gleizes approached abstraction conceptually rather than visually and in 1924 his intricate dialectic caused him to produce two amusing paintings which departed from his usual subject matter: the Imaginary Still Lifes, Blue and Green. In effect, writes Robbins, "Gleizes would have inverted Courbet's "Show me an angel and I will paint you an angel" to be "As long as an angel remains an unembodied ideal and cannot be shown to me, I'll paint it."[1]
By 1919 the pre-war sense of the Cubist movement had been virtually shattered. Paris was overshadowed by a strong reaction against those visions of common effort and revolutionary construction which Gleizes continued to embrace, while the avant-garde was characterized by the anarchic and, to him, destructive spirit of Dada. Neither alternative held any appeal for him and, with the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, his old hostility to Paris was constantly nourished. Gleizes' attempt to resuscitate the spirit of the Section d'Or was met with great difficulty, despite support byAlexander Archipenko,Georges Braque andLéopold Survage.[1] His own organizational efforts were directed towards the re-establishment of a European-wide movement of abstract artists in the form of a large travelling exhibition, theExposition de la Section d’Or, in 1920; it was not the success he had hoped for. Cubism was passé for younger artists, although Gleizes, on the contrary, felt that only its preliminary phase had been investigated.[2]
It was the revival of the Section d'Or which ensured that Cubism in general and Gleizes in particular would become Dada's preferred target.[25] Similarly, an effort to organize an artists' cooperative received the support of Robert Delaunay, but of no other major artists.[1] The polemic resulted in the publication ofDu cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 byPainting and its Laws (La Peinture et ses lois), within which appear the notion oftranslation androtation that would ultimately characterize both the pictorial and theoretical aspects of Gleizes' art.[3] His post-Cubist style of the twenties—flat, forthright, uncompromising—is virtuallyBlaise Pascal's "Spirit of Geometry."[1]
Gleizes was in nearly every sense a maverick Cubist, perhaps the most unyielding of them all; both in his paintings and writings (which had a big impact on the image of Cubism in Europe and the United States). He developed a single-minded, thoroughly uncompromising Cubism without the diversion of a classical alternative. During the 1920s Gleizes worked on a highly abstract brand of Cubism. In addition to his shows atLéonce Rosenberg's L'Effort Moderne, the dealer-publisher Povolozky printed his writings. His art was indeed backed by a prodigious theoretical effluence, most notably inLa Peinture et ses lois (first published inLa Vie des Lettres, October 1922). Gleizes fused aesthetic, metaphysical, moral and social priorities to describe the status and function of art.[25]
InLa Peinture et ses lois writes Robbins, "Gleizes deduced the rules of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the laws of the universe. This theory, later referred to astranslation-rotation, ranks with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms."[2] Flat planes were set in motion simultaneously to evoke space by shifting across one another, as if rotating and tilting on oblique axes. Diagrams entitled "Simultaneous movements of rotation and shifting of the plane on its axis" were published to illustrate the concept.
Gleizes undertook the task of writing the characterizations of these principles inPainting and its Laws (La Peinture et ses lois), published by gallery owner Jacques Povolozky in the journalLa Vie des lettres et des arts, 1922–23, as a book in 1924,[4][26][27] and reproduced inLéonce Rosenberg'sBulletin de l'Effort moderne, no. 13, March 1925, no. 14, April 1925.[28]
One of Gleizes's primary objectives was to answer the questions: How will the planar surface be animated, and by what logical method, independent of the artistsfantaisie, can it be attained?[29]
The approach:
Gleizes bases these laws both on truisms inherent throughout the history of art, and especially on his own experience since 1912, such as:The primary goal of art has never been exterior imitation (p. 31);Artworks come from emotion... the product of individual sensibility and taste (p. 42);The artist is always in a state of emotion, sentimental exaltation [ivresse] (p. 43);The painting in which the idea of abstract creation is realized is no longer an anecdote, but a concrete fact (p. 56);Creating a painted artwork is not the emission of an opinion (p. 59);The plastic dynamism will be born out of rhythmic relations between objects... establishing novel plastic liaisons between purely objective elements that compose the painting (p. 22).[27][30]
Continuing, Gleizes states that the 'reality' of a painting is not that of a mirror, but of the object... issue of imminent logic (p. 62). 'The subject-pretext tending toward numeration, inscribed following the nature of the plane, attains a tangent intersections between known images of the natural world and unknown images that reside within intuition' (p. 63).[27][29]
Defining the laws:
Rhythm and space are for Gleizes the two vital conditions. Rhythm is a consequence of the continuity of certain phenomena, variable or invariable, following from mathematical relations. Space is a conception of the human psyche that follows from quantitative comparisons (pp. 35, 38, 51). This mechanism is the foundation for artistic expression. It is therefore both a philosophical and scientific synthesis. For Gleizes, Cubism was a means to arrive not only at a new mode of expression but above all a new way of thinking. This was, according to art historianPierre Alibert [fr], the foundation of both a new species of painting and an alternative relationship with the world; hence another principle of civilization.[27][29]
The problem set out by Gleizes was to replaceanecdote as a starting point for the work of art, by the sole means of using the elements of the painting itself: line, form and color.[27][29]
Beginning with a central rectangle, taken as an example of elementary form, Gleizes points out two mechanical ways of juxtaposing form to create a painting: (1) either by reproducing the initial form (employing varioussymmetries such as reflectional, rotational or translational), or by modifying (or not) its dimensions.[27] (2) By displacement of the initial form; pivoting around an imaginary axis in one direction or another.[27][29]
The choice of position (through translation and/or rotation), though based on the inspiration of the artist, is no longer attributed to the anecdotal. An objective and rigorous method, independent of the painter, replaces emotion or sensibility in the determination the placement of form, that is throughtranslation androtation.[27][29]
Schematic illustrations:
_1._Mouvements_de_translation_du_plan_sur_un_c%25C3%25B4t%25C3%25A9.jpg)
Space and rhythm, according to Gleizes, are perceptible by the extent of movement (displacement) of planar surfaces. These elemental transformations modify the position and importance of the initial plane, whether they converge or diverge ('recede' or 'advance') from the eye, creating a series of new and separate spatial planes appreciable physiologically by the observer.[27][29]
_2._Mouvements_simultan%25C3%25A9s_de_rotation_et_de_translation_du_plan.jpg)
Another movement is added to the first movement of translation of the plane to one side: Rotation of the plane. Fig. I shows the resulting formation that follows from simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the initial plane produced on the axis. Fig II and Fig. III represent the simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the rectangle, inclined to the right and to the left. The axis point at which movement is realized is established by the observer. Fig. IV represents the simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the rectangle plane, with the position of the eye of the observed displaced left of the axis. Displacement toward the right (though not represented) is straightforward enough to imagine.[27][29]
_3._Mouvements_simultan%25C3%25A9s_de_rotation_et_de_translation_du_plan_aboutissant_%25C3%25A0_la_cr%25C3%25A9ation_d%2527un_organisme_plastique_spatial_et_rythmique.jpg)
With these figures Gleizes attempts to present, under the most simple conditions possible (simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the plane), the creation of a spatial and rhythmic organism (Fig. VIII), with practically no initiative taken on the part of the artist who controls the evolutionary process. The planar surfaces of Fig. VIII are filled with hatching espousing the 'direction' of the planes. What emerges in the inert plane, according to Gleizes, through the movement followed by the eye of the observer, is "a visible imprint of successive stages of which the initial rhythmic cadence coordinated a succession of differing states". These successive stages permit the perception of space. The initial state, by consequence of the transformation, has become a spatial and rhythmic organism.[27][29]
_4._Syst%25C3%25A9me_plastique_spatial_et_rythmique_obtenue_par_la_conjugaison_des_mouvements_simultan%25C3%25A9s_de_rotation_et_de_translation_du_plan_et_des_mouvements_de_translation_du_plan_sur_un_c%25C3%25B4t%25C3%25A9.jpg)
Fig. I and Fig. II obtain mechanically, Gleizes writes, with minimal personal initiative, a "plastic spatial and rhythmic system", by the conjugation of simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the plane and from the movements of translation of the plane to one side. The result is a spatial and rhythmic organism morecomplex than shown in Fig. VIII; demonstrating through mechanical, purely plastic means, the realization of a material universe independent of intentional intervention by the artist. This is sufficient to demonstrate, according to Gleizes, thepossibilities of the plane to serve spatially and rhythmically by its own power.[27][29] [L'exposé hâtif de cette mécanique purement plastique aboutissant à la réalisation d'un univers matériel en dehors de l'intervention particulière intentionnelle, suffit à démontrer lapossibilité du plan de signifier spatialement et rythmiquement par sa seule puissance].[27][29]
Gleizes' painting of 1920–1922, submitted to the same rigor, were not Cubist in any conventional sense; but theywere Cubist in their concern withplanimetric space, and in their relationship (synthesis) with subject-matter. Indeed, the abstract appearance of these compositions is misleading. Gleizes had always remained committed to synthesis. He described how artists had freed themselves from the 'subject-image' as a pretext to work from the 'subjectless-image' (nebulous forms) until they came together. The images known from the natural world combined with those nebulous forms were made 'spiritually human'. Though Gleizes considered his works as initially nonrepresentational and only afterwards as denotational.[25]
Before World War I, Gleizes had always been identified as a Cubist avant-garde. And during the twenties he continued to hold a prominent position, but he was no longer identified with the avant-garde since Cubism had been superseded by Dada andSurrealism. Even after historians began their attempts to analyze the vital role played by Cubism, the name of Albert Gleizes was always mentioned because of his early and important participation in the movement. Gleizes had never ceased to call himself a Cubist and theoretically a Cubist he remained. In many ways his theories were close to those developed by Mondrian, though his paintings never submitted to the discipline of primary colors and the right angle; they were not Neo-Plastic (orDe Stijl) in character. In fact, his works from the late 1920s through the 1940s looked like nothing else that was being done, and indeed, they were rarely seen in the art world because Gleizes deliberately distanced himself from extensive participation in the Parisian scene.[2]
Gleizes realized that his evolution towards 'purity' carried with it the risk of alienation from the 'mentality of the milieu', but he saw it as the sole means of arriving at a new type of art that could reach a mass audience (just as the French murals of the 11th and 12th centuries). InDu Cubisme et les moyens de comprendre (1920), Gleizes went so far as to envisage the mass-production of painting; as a means of undermining the market system and thus the status of artworks as commodities. 'The multiplication of pictures,' Gleizes wrote, 'strikes at the heart of the understanding and the economic notions of the bourgeois.'[25]
After World War I, with the support given by the dealerLéonce Rosenberg, Cubism returned as a central issue for artists. With the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, Gleizes attempted to resuscitate the spirit of theSection d'Or in 1920 but was met with great difficulty, despite support byFernand Léger,Alexander Archipenko,Georges Braque,Constantin Brâncuși,Henri Laurens,Jacques Villon,Raymond Duchamp-Villon,Louis Marcoussis andLéopold Survage.[31][32] Gleizes' organizational efforts were directed towards the establishment of a European-wide movement of Cubist andabstract art in the form of a large traveling exhibition; theExposition de la Section d’Or. The idea was to bring together a collection of works that revealed the complete process of transformation and renewal that had taken place.[33] It was not the success he had hoped for. Cubism was seen as passé for emerging artists and other established artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Picabia, although Gleizes, on the contrary, felt that only its preliminary phase had been investigated.[34]
In addition to Cubists works (which already represented a wide variety of styles), the second edition of the Section d'Or held at the Galerie La Boétie from 5 March 1920 includedDe Stijl,Bauhaus,Constructivism andFuturism.[35] It was the revival of the Section d'Or which ensured that Cubism in general would becomeDada's preferred target.[36] The new polemic resulted in the publication ofDu cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Gleizes, followed in 1922 byLa Peinture et ses lois.[37][38]
Following the death of Jules Roche, the Gleizes' had enough independent income and real estate to pursue their goals without bowing to material considerations, unlike many other artists. The Gleizes' spent more and more time at the family home in Serrières, in Cavalaire, and an even quieter location on theFrench Riviera, both associating with people more sympathetic to their social ideas. Gleizes became active in theUnion Intellectuelle and lectured extensively in France, Germany, Poland and England, while continuing to write. In 1924–25 the Bauhaus (where certain ideals analogous to his own were practiced) requested a new book on Cubism (as part of a series which includedWassily Kandinsky'sPoint and Line to Plane, Paul Klee'sPedagogical Notebooks, andKasimir Malevich'sThe Non-Objective World[5]). Gleizes, in response, would writeKubismus (published in 1928) for the collection of Bauhausbücher 13, Munich. The publication of Kubismus in French the following year would bring Gleizes closer to Delaunay.[1][3] In 1924 Gleizes, Léger andAmédée Ozenfant openedAcadémie Moderne.[5]
In 1927, still dreaming of the communal days at the Abbaye de Créteil, Gleizes founded an artist's colony at a rented house called theMoly-Sabata [fr] inSablons near his wife's family home in Serrières in theArdèche département in the Rhône Valley.[3][5]
Léonce Rosenberg, in 1929, commissioned Gleizes (replacingGino Severini) to paint decorative panels for his Parisian residence, which would be installed in 1931. The same year Gleizes was part of the committee of Abstraction-Création (founded byTheo van Doesburg,Auguste Herbin,Jean Hélion andGeorges Vantongerloo) that acted as a forum for internationalnon-representational art, and counteracted the influence of theSurrealist group led byAndré Breton. By this time, his work reflected the strengthening of his religious convictions and his 1932 book,Vers une conscience plastique, La Forme et l’histoire examinesCeltic,Romanesque, andOriental art. On tour inPoland andGermany, he gave lectures titledArt et Religion, Art et Production andArt et Science and wrote a book on Robert Delaunay but it was never published.[3][5]
In 1934 Gleizes began a series of paintings that would continue for several years, in which three levels are identified:static translation, corresponding to his researches of the 1920s;mobile rotation, corresponding to his researches into coloured cadences of the late 1920s and early 1930s; andsimple grey arcs which, Gleizes argues, gives the 'form' or unifying 'rhythm' of the painting. The level of 'translation' is generally a geometrical figure evoking a representational image, unlike the work of the early 1930s. These works no longer articulate the strict non-representation ofAbstraction Création.Léonce Rosenberg—who had already published Gleizes extensively in hisBulletin de l'Effort Moderne, but had not previously shown much enthusiasm for his painting—was deeply impressed by Gleizes' paintings (which followed from his 1934 research) at the Salon d'Automne. This was the beginning of a close relationship with Gleizes, which continued through the 1930s and is reflected in a stream of correspondence.[5]
In 1937, Gleizes was commissioned to paint murals for theExposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the Paris World's Fair. He collaborated with the Delaunays in thePavillon de l'Air and withLéopold Survage and Fernand Léger for thePavillon de l'Union des Artistes Modernes. At the end of 1938, Gleizes volunteered to participate in the free seminars and discussion groups for young painters set up by Robert Delaunay at his Paris studio.[3][5] Then Gleizes, in collaboration withJacques Villon, conceived the idea of executing a mural for the auditorium of the École des Arts et Métiers; the latter was rejected by the school authorities as too abstract, but immense panels by Gleizes survive asFour Legendary Figures of the Sky (San Antonio, TX, McNay A. Inst.). Other examples of this ambitious public style includeThe Transfiguration (1939–41; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.).
In the late 1930s, the wealthy American art connoisseurPeggy Guggenheim purchased a great deal of the new art in Paris including works by Albert Gleizes. She brought these works to the United States which today form part of thePeggy Guggenheim Collection.
Albert Gleizes did believe in the Roman catholic church and even considered himself a catholic dating back to the 1920s.[citation needed] Despite his admiration for the Western Christian tradition and the early medieval church, Gleizes did not join the Roman Catholic Church until 1941.[5] Gleizes believed that the church had lost its "spirit" since the rise of scholastic philosophy and representational art in the thirteenth century. However, in 1941, he soon came to believe that the sacraments were still true and effective, despite some intellectual deviations.[5]In 1942, he was formally confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church and received his First Communion. After joining the Church, Gleizes would write memoirs and series that talked about meditation such as "Supports de contemplation" and "Souvenirs: Le Cubisme" adding on Large Triptychs. A retrospective of Gleizes'artwork was held at the Chapelle du Lycée Ampère in Lyon in 1947, marking the end of his career. Gleizes' last creations include a set of 57 illustrations for Blaise Pascal's Pensées, and a fresco called The Eucharist which was located in a chapel at a new Jesuit seminary in the Fontaines community in Chantilly.[citation needed]
DuringWorld War II, Gleizes and his wife remained in France under the German occupation. In 1942 Gleizes began the series ofSupports de Contemplation, large scale, entirely non-representational paintings that are both very complex and very serene.[5] Materials being difficult to obtain during the war, Gleizes painted on burlap, sizing the porous material with a mixture of glue and paint. He had used burlap in some of his earliest paintings and now found it favorable to his vigorous touch, for it took the most powerful strokes even while preserving the matte surface he so valued. In 1952, Gleizes realized his last major work, a fresco titledEucharist that he painted for aJesuit chapel inChantilly.[5]
Albert Gleizes died inAvignon in theVaucluse département on 23 June 1953 and was interred in his wife's family mausoleum in the cemetery at Serrières.
In 2010,Le Chemin (Paysage à Meudon) (1911), oil on canvas, 146.4 x 114.4 cm, sold for 1,833,250 GBP ($2,683,878, or 2,198,983 Euros) at Christie's, London.[40]
"Gleizes' individual development, his unique struggle to reconcile forces," writes Daniel Robbins, "made him one of the few painters to come out of Cubism with a wholly individual style, undeflected by later artistic movements. Although he occasionally returned to earlier subjects... these later works were treated anew, on the basis of fresh insights. He never repeated his earlier styles, never remained stationary, but always grew more intense, more passionate. [...] His life ended in 1953 but his paintings remain to testify to his willingness to struggle for final answers. His is an abstract art of deep significance and meaning, paradoxically human even in his very search for absolute order and truth." (Daniel Robbins, 1964)[1]
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication ofDu "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, theMusée de La Poste in Paris presented a show entitledGleizes – Metzinger. Du cubisme et après, from 9 May to 22 September 2012. Over 80 paintings and drawings, along with documents, films and 15 works by other members of the Section d'Or group (Villon, Duchamp-Villon, Kupka, Le Fauconnier, Lhote, La Fresnaye, Survage, Herbin, Marcoussis, Archipenko...) were included in the show. A catalogue in French and English was published for the event. A French postage stamp is issued representing works by Gleizes (Le Chant de Guerre, 1915) and Metzinger (L'Oiseau Bleu, 1913). This is the first time that a museum has organized an exhibit showcasing both Gleizes and Metzinger together.[41]
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