Biographical Methodology Has Cretian Conversation That Draw Parallels Between What Two Groups Art

One of the founding fathers of Cubism, Gleizes was in equal parts artist, theoretician and philosopher. Every bit a member of the so-called Salon Cubists, he was responsible for bringing Cubism to the attention of the general public and, with Jean Metzinger, wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, the hugely influential, "Du Cubisme". His was an uncompromising commitment to the move and it was Gleizes who pushed Cubism towards its furthest point of abstraction. Driven by a religion in social idealism, he produced numerous writings that saw him progress the static, purely formal, aspects of Cubism towards something more animate and, ultimately, something more than divinely spiritual. Gleizes helped found many important creative societies and retreats, and, in later life, devoted his intellectual activity to exploring potential overlaps between Romanesque, Byzantine, Standard arabic, Celtic and modern art. Following his full conversion to Catholicism, he turned exclusively to religious paintings which he executed firmly within the Cubist tradition.

Biography of Albert Gleizes

Childhood

Albert was the son of a successful fabric merchant, Sylvan Gleizes (himself a keen amateur painter). His maternal uncle was Léon Commerre, an academic painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1875, while his father'south brother, Robert Gleizes, was a successful collector-dealer specializing in eighteenth century paintings. The Gleizes' lived a comfortable life in Courbevoie in the Paris suburbs. Albert was very shut to his ii sisters, Suzanne and Mireille (he had an elderberry brother who sadly died in infancy), and they oft appeared in his first paintings. Albert did not take to academic life and often played truant from his bourgeois schoolhouse in Rue Chaptal, preferring to spend his days writing poetry in the grounds of the cemetery of Montmartre. According to the curator Daniel Robbins, when Albert'southward "disciplinarian father discovered what was going on, he promptly put Albert to work in his pattern shop where he could personally supervise and bailiwick him". Gleizes willingly conceded later on that "the necessary precision demanded past design was important to his artistic training".

Early Training and Piece of work

In 1901 Gleizes was subscripted into military service, though he had already stated his desire to become a painter. This might have met with the approval of his father had he expressed a preference for academic grooming, but he was already demonstrating a rebellious streak through his fidelity to modernism. He began to pigment seriously while serving in northern France and initially followed in the style of the Impressionists. He exhibited his first pregnant work, a landscape titled La Seine à Asnières (1901), at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. In 1904 he exhibited two further paintings at the Salon d'Automne, an annual exhibition designed specifically to promote the work of contained artists. Having completed his military service, Gleizes cofounded the Association Ernest-Renan; an enterprise through which he organized arts events such as exhibitions and poesy readings. The arrangement was anti-militarist and sought to provide culture in order to spread the ideas of pacifism at a time of heightened international tension.

While in the military machine, Gleizes fabricated a close friend of the future poet Rene Arcos. The two men had developed an interest in symbolist poetry and the politics of democratic socialism. Both men believed fervently in the principle of a universal brotherhood fostered without the need for organized organized religion. Robbins suggests that until 1905, "Gleizes appears to accept had niggling directly awareness of action in the art world [and] even less contact with other painters". He admired the paintings of Pissarro, Seurat and Gauguin but these connections to his ain piece of work seemed rather "vicarious" when compared to "immature painters like Braque and Picasso [and] even Metzinger and Delaunay [who were already] engaged in a struggle for recognition". Robbins adds that these young artists "learned the channels for success, the construction of relationships and contacts, the evolution of the gallery-centered art market place, and they observed with interest the growth of diverse personalities and schools. The unsophisticated Gleizes [on the other manus] regarded the city as a bourgeois creation, a detestable place designed to trap artists as it trapped workers into a thousand evils, the worst of which would have been the abuse conferred by bourgeois approval".

Having completed their military service, Gleizes and Arcos became active in promoting utopian socialist politics and, in 1906, with the financial aid of Henri Martin Barzun, they established the Abbaye de Créteil, a phalanstery on the outskirts of Paris. Its members included the Symbolist poets Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac and Jules Romains and the community supported itself by publishing the writing of their members and others affiliated with the group. Robbins writes, "The Abbaye, whose fame circulated even in Moscow, attracted many artists. Marinetti and Brâncuși were visitors there and young writers like Roger Allard (1 of the beginning to defend Cubism), Pierre Jean Jouve, and Paul Castiaux are typical of the artists who wanted to have the Abbaye publish their works. Nevertheless, subsequently but 2 years, the Abbaye was forced to shut, mainly because of material hardship. There but was non enough coin to go on going".

Through his involvement with the Symbolists, Gleizes's socio-political concerns were underscored past a deep sense of "symbolic reality". A newly galvanized Gleizes moved subsequently to Rue de Delta where he joined the society of Amedeo Modigliani and other avant-gardists. It was at this fourth dimension that he dispensed with Impressionism, dropped his dalliances with Fauvism, and started to develop what would go his signature strong-linear style. In 1908 he produced Jour de marché à Bagnère-de-Bigorre, what Gleizes's biographer, Peter Brooke identified as his beginning "proto-Cubist" work.

In 1909 Gleizes met painter Henri Le Fauconnier (a former educatee at the Academie Julian and a friend of Maurice Denis and Les Nabis) whose portrait of the poet Pierre Jean Jouve proved a revelation. Inspired by Le Fauconnier, a painter who was himself at present working in the stylistic style of Cubism's pioneers, Picasso and Braque, Gleizes adapted his manner accordingly. Painted in 1909, his full-torso portrait of Arcos, striding across a broad landscape, was Gleizes's commencement full experimentation with Cubism. He had adopted its preference for simplified forms, potent lines, and a restrained utilise of colour; a style that Robbins summarized equally a "volumetric approach to Cubism" that featured a "successful union of a broad field of vision with a flat motion picture plane".

In 1910 both artists continued to concentrate on the human figure with Le Fauconnier producing a portrait of the poet Paul Castiaux, and Gleizes, a portrait of his uncle, Robert Gleizes. In the same year, the ii men joined a group of artists who pledged earnest allegiance to the Cubist cause though they collectively baulked at Picasso and Braque's inflexible formalist rules that (equally they saw information technology) express Cubism's potential. Robbins noted that, for his function, Gleizes never set out (like Picasso and Braque) to "analyse and describe visual reality". For Gleizes still lifes - or rather "neutral objects from daily life" - could never "satisfy his complex idealistic concepts of true reality" and that Gleizes "always stressed subjects of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning [and regarding] the painting as the area where mental sensation and the existent space of the world could not just meet merely likewise be resolved".

Mature Menstruum

Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger committed to the investigation of form rather than follow the Post-Impressionist preference for flights of color and symbolism. The group made history in 1911 when they exhibited in the infamous "Salle 41" ("Room 41") at the Salon des Indépendants. Their Cubist experiments, featuring four pieces by Gleizes, including La Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox) (1910), drew large crowds, but a fiercely negative response from critics, including a review past Louis Vauxcelles who dismissed the group as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human form [...] to pallid cubes". The exhibition even garnered a response from the French Parliament that condemned Cubism as a "barbaric art". Speaking of La Femme aux Phlox specifically, meanwhile, the critic Jean Claude lamented: "A talented artist, Albert Gleizes, allowed himself to endeavour a triangulist representation of the human figure. This is distressing, deeply".

Information technology is true that the five men were responding to the challenge to Mail Impressionism already laid down past Picasso and Braque, only it was Gleizes and his partners who deserve the credit for introducing Cubism to the French public. The group was in fact able to count the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire amongst their few professional person allies after he praised them for hastening "la déroute de l'impressionisme" (the derailment of Impressionism). Indeed, Apollinaire'south enthusiasm was such he became affiliated with Gleizes and his Cubist circle of friends.

In 1911 Gleizes met Picasso for the get-go fourth dimension. Their meeting went a long way to confirming his rising star within the new Cubist motility which had been appear following the "Salle 41" controversy. Over the following ii years his interest in the philosophical foundations of Cubist fine art developed and he soon savage under the influence of the popular French philosopher Henri Bergson.

Bergson had presented the thought of simultaneity, a science-based theory that proposed that ii conflicting features - the permanent and the transitory - could coexist simultaneously. This idea proved inspirational for Gleizes who saw a mode of applying it to Cubist painting. Gleizes declared that Cubism, different other "static" fine art, was "a normal development of an art that was mobile like life itself". Not content with addressing himself to strictly formal concerns, Gleizes started to explore ways of combining social and spiritual themes in a way that chimed with the likes of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In Gleizes's view, art would help re-class the earth according to the sensations of the individual; and in this utopian vision, color and form were, as they were for Cézanne earlier him, a unifying, rather than alien, forcefulness. The starting time results were works that captured motion from a multiple viewpoints, notably the vast Le Dépiquage des Moissons (The Harvesters) (1912).

In 1912, Gleizes joined Groupe de Puteaux, a cadre of artists working in a more broadly defined mode of Cubism than the one being proposed by Picasso and Braque. The Puteaux group, established by Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, met at Villon'south house in Puteaux (on the outskirts of Paris) and occasionally at Gleizes's house in Paris. In the fall of 1912, the Puteaux group put on an impressive exhibition, "Section d'Or" ("Golden Department"), at the Galerie la Boétie in Paris. The name was suggested by Villon who was keenly pursuing an interest in mathematical proportions, and peculiarly the ancient concept of the golden section (section d'or), every bit a fashion of perfecting the Cubist business organisation with geometric forms. For his role, Gleizes exhibited 2 pieces Women in a Kitchen (1911) and The Harvesters (1912). Robbins referred to the latter equally "the masterpiece of the Section d'Or" that was "non merely an chestnut in a scene [just rather] "a multiple panorama jubilant the worker, his fabric life and his collective activeness in securing that life on a permanently irresolute state. Gleizes confronts us non with 1 activeness or place, only with many: non with in one case, only with past and futurity as well every bit present".

Such was the impact of the Section d'Or exhibition, it gave rise to a loose new association of artists that would involve the likes of Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, Anndré Lhote, Louis Marcoussis and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Du Cubisme was an essay cowritten by Gleizes and Metzinger that was published in book course in 1912. It fabricated a significant impact on the art world and was translated into several languages. The text was augmented past reproductions of works by eleven artists - Gleizes, Metzinger, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Duchamp, Gris, Picabia, André Derain and Marie Laurencin - all of whom had, to i degree or other, influenced or embraced Cubism. It is considered the kickoff formal treatise on Cubist aesthetics (a revised edition was published in 1947 included a forward and epilogue in which the authors' explained their motivations for writing the original essay) and according to its authors information technology was intended to explicate the influences and philosophy that defined the movement. Gleizes and Metzinger besides argued the point that it was (or should be) the artist, rather than the critic, dealer or historian, who was best placed to articulate Cubism's precise goals.

In 1913 Gleizes took function in the famous Cubist exhibitions at the Armory Show in New York, the first overseas foray for the movement. It was in New York that Gleizes met his future wife, Juliette Roche. With the outbreak of the Starting time Earth State of war in the post-obit year, Gleizes enlisted as an entertainment organizer and worked in the role of impresario. While stationed in Toul, he painted Portrait of an Army Doc (1914-15), a commissioned piece of work for a doctor named Lambert who had made it possible for Gleizes to pigment while enlisted. According to Gleizes, Lambert had been upset with the semi-abstruse image and accepted a modest gouache study by style of compensation. With the help of Juliette'south father, a high-ranking authorities official, Gleizes was discharged from the army in 1915 and the couple moved to New York. Works such as Composition for "Jazz" (1915) and Broadway (1915) followed marker the artist move more and more than towards total brainchild.

In 1916 the couple traveled to Barcelona where he held his beginning solo exhibition. Only in the menstruation leading upward to his render to France in 1919, Gleizes began to allow religious ideas, and specifically the conflicts of censor between a modern artist and a human being of faith, to enter his thinking. In 1918 he reportedly announced to his wife: "A terrible thing has happened to me: I believe I am finding God". Following his epiphany, he decried what he saw as the barren aestheticism of Picasso and Braque'southward Cubism and alleged that Cubism ought to advance down a more spiritual path.

Belatedly Menstruation

Having returned to Paris, Gleizes discovered to his consternation that Cubism had lost its ascendency and was giving manner to the more "irreverent" movements, namely, Dada and Surrealism. Following an unsuccessful endeavour to revive Section d'Or with a traveling exhibition in 1920, Gleizes slowly retreated from the public glare of the Parisian fine art scene, just he continued to pigment and write in the name of the Cubist project. In 1920 he published Du Cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre ("Cubism and the Means to Sympathise It") and, in 1924, La Peinture et ses lois ("The Laws of Painting"). Gleizes connected to argue for the principles of Cubism and dismissed the illusionism of single perspective art as the enemy of true pictorial expression, arguing instead for what he called the "translation" and "rotation" of volumetric forms in space. In his exercise, meanwhile, the 1920s was a flow in which Gleizes produced what has been described as "mail service-Cubist" work - but "post" only in the sense that he was producing a highly abstruse form of Cubism, as evidenced in works such as Ecuyère (1920-3).

Gleizes himself asserted that the office of art should never succumb to fake, and that its "truth" comes from "private sensibility and taste". He spoke of the many planes of a Cubist artwork every bit a "rhythmic organism" and that the true artwork was one that was "brought to life" through natural and aesthetic forms combining to make the image "spiritually man". Merely his fresh impetus did lilliputian to revive the fortunes of the movement that had been all only assigned to history. Robbins wrote, "Different Picasso [Gleizes] had neither participated in Surrealism nor returned to reality. Nor did he practice that almost rational and ordered art, Neo-Plasticism. Although in many means his theories were close to those adult by Piet Mondrian, his paintings never submitted to the subject field of main colors and the right angle; they did non look Neo-Plastic" Robbins ended that Gleizes "had never ceased to telephone call himself a Cubist [and] a Cubist he remained [for the residue of his career]".

Juliette'due south male parent had died in 1923, leaving her a big portfolio of properties. Gleizes began to spend time at the house at Serrières where he became more immersed in theology thanks to an impressive library inherited from Juliette's great uncle, a former Bishop in the Diocese of Gap. In 1926 Gleizes father, Sylvain, passed away, and soon subsequently he was involved in a serious car crash which left him hospitalized for two weeks. The couple sought to cease their run of bad fortune with the purchase of Nostradamus'south erstwhile estate in St. Rémy de Provence.

In 1927 the Gleizes' founded Moly-Sabata, an agrarian-based artists' commune in Sablons, a village close to Lyon. Moly-Sabata created a kind of community utopia that encouraged individuals to express themselves artistically, but also to share their ideas based on Gleizes'southward own conviction that art should strive for an absolute truth and, within the confines of Moly-Sabata at least, seek perfection in artisanal works. Life in the district was oftentimes likened to a archaic monastic existence and, equally a manner of opposing the bourgeois fine art of the Salon, residents refused to engage with "social exhibitions" and were encouraged to "spread their truth" via purely oral and written ways. (Between 1927-30, the retreat was managed past the painter/sculptor Robert Pouyaud, and between 1930-51, by the Australian painter and ceramist Anne Danger. It continues to thrive as an artists' residency to this day under the auspices of Albert Gleizes Foundation.)

In 1930 Gleizes published Vie et mort de l'occident Chrétien (Life and Death of the Christian W), in which he denounced the Industrial revolution on the grounds that it was incompatible with the Christian faith. He also traveled extensively during that time, promoting his theories of art in Poland, England, and Germany, fifty-fifty delivering a lecture at the Bauhaus where it was known that Kandinsky was in attendance. He helped organize anti-war meetings with the Unions intellectuelles françaises and, in 1932, he published Vers une conscience plastique: la forme et 50'histoire (Toward a Plastic Consciousness: Form and History) in which he broadened his sphere of intellectual enquiry to include an examination of Celtic, Asian, and Romanesque fine art.

Effectually the aforementioned time, Gleizes joined Brainchild Cosmos, a group dedicated to an fine art of pure geometric abstraction in the vein of De Stijl and Suprematism. He collaborated with Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Léopold Survage, on Cubist murals for the 1937 Globe's Off-white in Paris, and the following year (in gild to raise funds to buy Moly-Sabata outright), he sold several paintings to the American fine art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim. On the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, Gleizes started a second artists' commune, called Les Méjades, near the St. Rémy-de-Provence. Gleizes himself remained in France during the war and continued to work on a number of projects.

Having been confirmed by the Cosmic Church in 1941, Gleizes began writing his memoirs (published in part as Souvenirs: Le Cubisme, 1908-14 in 1957) and produced a series of paintings on meditation chosen "Supports de Contemplation" (the shortages brought on by the Nazi occupation necessitated his painting on burlap). He followed in 1943 with a large triptych that encompassed: The Crucifixion, Christ in Glory and The Transfiguration. Gleizes'south last works included a series of 57 original etchings for a new edition of the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal'southward famous defence of the Christian religion, Pensées (1950), and a fresco, The Eucharist (1952), for the chapel at the new Jesuit seminary of the Fontaines customs in Chantilly. Gleizes passed away in Provence in 1953 at the historic period of 71 post-obit complications from a routine operation.

The Legacy of Albert Gleizes

Gleizes was never a party to the fame bestowed upon Picasso and Braque, just within the Cubist motion, he left his marker as probably its most serious and committed innovator. Every bit a member of the Salon Cubists, he was in part responsible for announcing the movement to the European and American public, simply it was through his application of mathematical and philosophical principles that he created a truly idiosyncratic vision that pushed Cubism to its furthest reaches. Indeed, his personal vision, which in the inter-state of war years saw him embrace metaphysics, breathed new life into a movement that to nearly modernists, in their incessant search for "the new", was a relic of an old avant-garde. As Robbins observed, Gleizes was one of the few Cubists "with a wholly individual mode"; an artist, moreover, who "never repeated his earlier styles, never remained stationary, but e'er grew more intense [and] more passionate".

Given the ascendancy of others within the movement, it is for his theoretical analysis of Cubism that Gleizes confirmed his niche inside 20^th century French art. Du Cubisme amounted to the first philosophical and aesthetic justification for the Cubist project just it was only the get-go of numerous books and articles that investigated the formal, concrete, and later, metaphysical possibilities for Cubist art. This led Robbins to the view that Gleizes was "perhaps the but painter of [the twentieth] century to have consciously struggled betwixt the demands of reason and faith, in a reasonable - indeed a vivid - manner and finally to have come down on the side of religion". He concluded that Gleizes'due south was "an abstract art of deep significance and meaning, paradoxically man fifty-fifty in his very search for absolute order and truth".

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/gleizes-albert/

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