Albert Léon Gleizes

ALBERT LÉON GLEIZES (France, 1881 - 1953).
"Composition aux personnages ou femme á la guitarre ou Personnage dans un décor cubiste ou madam Gleizes au chevalet", 1923.
Oil on cardboard.
Work reproduced in the catalog raisonné of the artist.
Presents inscription on the back.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 27,5 x 21,5 cm; 48,5 x 42 cm (frame).
Exhibitions:
- Vente Versailles. Hotel Rameau, 1980, 1983.
-Hotel des Ventes, 1981, 1986.
This work, created in 1923 and linked to the years of consolidation of synthetic cubism, displays a fragmented spatial construction where the human figures, recognizable but subjected to an intense geometric schematization, are inserted in an environment equally decomposed in chromatic planes and rhythms. The painting articulates an intimate scene through simplified volumes, broken lines and a deliberate use of two-dimensionality, which avoids any traditional illusion of depth to privilege the simultaneity of points of view and the analytical reading of forms. The colors, applied with an almost rough texture, combine bright yellows, greens and saturated blues, along with a series of rhythmic patterns in red and ochre that function as ornamental borders and support the structure of the whole. This chromatic choice responds to the spirit of the time, which sought to reconcile formal experimentation with a more accessible visual harmony after the radical ruptures of early Cubism. The central figure, possibly female, is presented in a posture that combines frontality with displaced profiles, a characteristic resource of cubist research on simultaneous perception. The bodies and objects are assembled like pieces of a compositional mechanism that balances constructive rigor and a certain expressive warmth, typical of Gleizes in the 1920s, when the movement was moving towards greater theoretical order and a purification of form. The result is a scene that does not narrate an event, but proposes a visual experience where the identity of the subjects is secondary to the rhythmic organization of space and the search for a conceptual unity between figure, background and geometric structure.
During his early years, Gleizes works in his father's industrial design studio in Paris. Finally, after completing high school, he spent four years in the army and then began his career as a painter, initially doing landscapes. His first works are framed in impressionism, with works such as "La Seine à Asnières", exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year he participated in the first Salon d'Automne in Paris, and soon came into contact with Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger and Heri Le Fauconnier. In 1910 he joined Cubism, of which he was one of the first and most important theoreticians, together with Metzinger. That same year he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. Three years later he participated in the collective of the Armory Show, in New York. During the war he enlisted again in the army, and after the war he moved to New York. He also traveled to Barcelona and Bermuda, and in 1916 he held his first individual exhibition at the Dalmau Galleries in Barcelona. Two years later we find him fully committed to the search for spiritual values, which will be reflected both in his painting and in his texts. In 1927 he founded in Sablons Moly-Sabata, a utopian community of artists and craftsmen, in a way a continuation of the Abbaye de Créteil that he had formed, together with other artists and writers, on the outskirts of Paris in 1906. In 1931, Gleizes participated in the Abstraction-Création committee that acted as a forum for international non-figurative art. By then, his work reflects the strengthening of his religious convictions and in 1932, in his book "La Forme et l'histoire" he examines Celtic, Romanesque and Oriental art. During these years he will give lectures in Poland and Germany, and will be hired to paint murals for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1937. Almost a decade later, between 1949 and 1950, he worked on illustrations for Blaise Pascal's book "Pensées sur l'homme et Dieu". In 1951 Gleizes was appointed jury of the Prix de Rome, and the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor. Considered a great renovator of religious art, in 1951 he produced his last great work, a fresco entitled "Eucharist" which he painted for the Jesuit chapel in Chantilly. Albert Gleizes is currently represented in the Guggenheim Museums in Venice and New York, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, the MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Tate Gallery and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, among other collections around the world.