Background
Mr. Gleizes was born in Paris, France, on December 8, 1881. He was the son of a fabric designer and nephew of Leon Comerre, a talented portrait painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1875.
artist philosopher Theoretician
Mr. Gleizes was born in Paris, France, on December 8, 1881. He was the son of a fabric designer and nephew of Leon Comerre, a talented portrait painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1875.
Albert Gleizes completed his studies at a local secondary school.
As a young adult, Mr. Gleizes was most passionate about theatre. His father, concerned about the profitability of his son’s interest (though willing to support it to an extent), required him to work in his fabric-design studio on a daily basis. Gleizes credited that experience with fostering his interest in colour, line, and design. He first started painting in his late teens, working in the style of the Impressionists. He exhibited his work, a landscape titled The Seine in Asnières (1901), for the first time in 1902 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Mr. Gleizes continued to paint while serving in the French military from 1903 to 1905. In 1904 he exhibited two paintings at the Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition of independent artists. He cofounded Abbaye de Créteil, a community outside Paris composed of writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals, among them poets Georges Duhamel, René Arcos, Charles Vildrac, and Jules Romains. The community supported itself by publishing writings by its members and affiliates, but when in 1907 that income proved insufficient to cover the rent, Abbaye de Créteil folded after just one year.
In 1909 Albert Gleizes met painter Henri Le Fauconnier, whose Cubist portrait of the poet Pierre Jean Jouve had a profound effect on the direction Gleizes would take with his own painting. Gleizes’s full-length portrait of Arcos painted the next year shows Le Fauconnier’s influence and Gleizes’s first experimentation with Cubism in its simplified forms, flatness, strong lines, and restrained use of colour.
Over the next year Mr. Gleizes became involved with a group of artists who, with Le Fauconnier, became leading Cubists: Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger. Together the five artists made history at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants when they exhibited their works in the same room, the notorious "Salle 41" ("Room 41"). Though Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had been painting in such a fashion since about 1907, that new group of young artists introduced Cubism to the general public for the first time. Albert Gleizes exhibited four paintings - two landscapes, a male nude, and Woman with Phlox (1910), an angular monochromatic rendering of a woman whose form merges with her surroundings. The exhibition drew large crowds and elicited strong, mostly negative, reactions. The following year he wrote the first of many articles. In collaboration with Metzinger, Gleizes wrote Du cubisme, published in 1912. The same year Gleizes helped found the Section d'Or.
In 1914 Gleizes again saw military service, before being discharged the following year. His paintings had become abstract by 1915. He traveled to New York, Barcelona, and Bermuda during the following four years influenced his stylistic evolution. In 1916, he sailed to Spain where he had his first one-man show at the Galeria Dalmau in Barcelona. Beginning in 1918 Albert Gleizes became deeply involved in a search for spiritual values, as reflected in his painting and writing.
In 1927 he founded Moly-Sabata, an agrarian-based artists’ utopian commune in Sablons, a village not far from the French city of Lyon. His book, La Forme et l'histoire, published in 1932, examines Romanesque, Celtic, and Oriental art. In the 1930s Mr. Gleizes participated in the Abstraction-Création group. Later in his career Albert Gleizes executed several large commissions, including the murals for the Paris World's Fair of 1937. In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, Albert Gleizes started another commune for artists and students called Les Méjades (near St. Rémy-de-Provence, France). In 1947 his major retrospective took place in Lyons at the Chapelle du Lycée Ampère. From 1949 to 1950 Gleizes worked on illustrations for Blaise Pascal's Pensées Sur l'Homme et Dieu. He executed a fresco, Eucharist, for the chapel Les Fontaines at Chantilly in 1952.
Femme au Fauteuil
On a Sailboat
Football Players
Untitled
The Schoolboy
Landscape with Bridge and Viaduct
Two Women Seated by a Window
On Brooklyn Bridge
Untitled
Portrait of Igor Stravinsky
Untitled
La Chasse
Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud)
Portrait de Miss Bessie Baver
Untitled
Portrait de Jacques Nayral
Untitled
Vers le port
Arabesque brush or Cubist Composition
Acrobats
Houses in a Valley
Landscape with Mill
Paysage
Matière et Lumière ou le Christ au Tétramorphe
Untitled
New York
Woman with Animals
Figure Cubiste
Sitting nude
Landscape with Chimneys
Composition (For Jazz)
Composition au diapason
Femmes cousant
The Swimmers
Untitled
Tarrytown
Untitled
Serrieres
Composition
Femme Cubiste
Though Albert Gleizes had considered himself a Roman Catholic since the 1920s, he was confirmed and officially joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1941.
Quotations:
"In nearly all the papers, all composure was lost. The critics would begin by saying: there is no need to devote much space to the Cubists, who are utterly without importance, and then they furiously gave them seven columns out of the ten that were taken up, at that time, by the Salon."
"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."
"We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile."
"In opposition to the immobile means of expression that the Academy was teaching, these painters threw down like a challenge a mobile expression; to volumes situated in space they preferred the living dynamism of coloured form in evolution."
"Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'être. We should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers, or landscape, or faces whose mere reflection it might have been. Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; not yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised to the level of a pure effusion at the first step."
"But we cannot enjoy in isolation; we wish to dazzle others with that which we daily snatch from the world of sense, and in return we wish others to show us their trophies. From a reciprocity of concessions arise those mixed images, which we hasten to confront with artistic creations in order to compute what they contain of the objective; that is of the purely conventional."
"Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting."
"I wish to establish the true history of Cubism whose beginning was not a matter of mere chance, something dependent on a throw of the dice, but clearly linked to that revaluation of all the values of whose absolute necessity no-one in these days can be in any doubt."
"All the constructions of this first phase of the youth of the group bear witness to its constant characteristics. The epic imagination is a proof of its esemplastic power. Everything is formal, inventive and arithmetical, therefore rhythmic."
"The first manifestations of Cubism took people by surprise because their minds, ill-adapted as they are to the idea of movement, are never able, on the basis of what is in front of them, to envisage what is to come."
"Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer."
Albert Gleizes was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and also a founder as well as a participant in the Abbaye de Créteil.
Albert Gleizes got married to Juliette Roche in 1915, daughter of a government official.