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Albert Gleizes
(París, 1881- Aviñon, 1953)

Albert Léon Gleizes was born in December 1881, the son of Sylvain Gleizes (1852-1926) and Elizabeth Valentine Commere. His father ran an industrial design shop in Paris, which Albert entered as an apprentice at the age of 18. Self-taught and interested in a range of disciplines, Gleizes, against his father's wishes, chose early on to pursue a career as an actor, although he soon turned to painting in 1902. Following a period of military service, Gleizes, along with Alexandre Mercereau (1884-1945), Charles Vidrac (1882-1971), Georges Duhamel (1884-1966) and Henri Martin Barzun, became involved in the newly-formed Association Ernest Renan, which was dedicated to the cause of popular education. Through teaching, writing, and other activities, Gleizes would remain steadfast in his commitment to education, social causes, and lay culture throughout his life.

In December 1906, Gleizes, Vildrac, Duhamel, Barzun, the musician Albert Doyen, and the poet René Arcos (1881-1966), who Gleizes met at his father's shop, embarked on yet another project - the founding of an artist's community in Créteil, a small village on the outskirts of Paris. To earn money for the colony, members of the so-called Abbaye de Créteil operated a high quality printing press that published the work of the post-Symbolist poets of the group as well as sympathetic authors, including Robert de Montesquiou (1855-1921), Mecislas Goldberg (1868-1907), and Jules Romains (1885-1972). Throughout this period, which came to an abrupt end in January 1908 when the Abbaye could no longer sustain its activities economically, Gleizes painted modest scenes of the Parisian banlieu in a post-Nabis style that offers little evidence that the artist was aware of the radical Fauve and pre-Cubist work that was then being produced in Paris.

Over the course of the next two years Gleizes dedicated himself increasingly to his métier as a painter. In 1909 he met Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946), whose linear style and simplified approach to form exercised a profound influence on Gleizes's development. In 1910 Gleizes exhibited at the Salon des indépendants for the first time, where he came into contact with an artist who would soon become his close collaborator, Jean Metzinger (1883-1956). Noting a stylistic similarity among the three artists, who emphasized broad masses of form over color, the poet and critic Roger Allard (1885-1961) proclaimed the appearance of a new school of painting. This informal group soon expanded to include Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Robert Delaunay (1881-1945), laying the foundations for the phenomenon that has come to be known as "Salon" Cubism.

Using Le Fauconnier's studio as a meeting place, this newly-formed alliance of painters (Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay, Léger, and Marie Laurencin [1885-1957]) decided to exhibit as a group at the 1911 Salon des indépendants. By this time Gleizes had begun to develop an advanced, post-Cézannist pictorial syntax, earning himself and his friends the derogatory title of "Cubists." Several months later, Gleizes's submissions to the Salon d'automne caused a public sensation, and his work became the topic of both negative and friendly criticism. At this time Gleizes also met Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braques (1882-1963), and the Duchamp brothers - Marcel (1887-1968), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), and Jacques Villon (1875-1963). When the group again exhibited at the Salon d'automne the following year, their participation provoked a debate in the Chambre des Deputés over whether or not Cubism was a "French" national art form worthy of being exhibited in the public salons. Partially in response to these accusations, Gleizes and Metzinger prepared their seminal text Du Cubisme, defending the movement and outlining their theory of planar form and multi-dimensional perspectives. The tract soon appeared in several French and foreign language editions, insuring Gleizes and his Cubist colleagues an international audience. In April 1912 Gleizes and other members of the now infamous group participated in the "Exposicio d'Art Cubista" in Barcelona. The following year Gleizes sent work to the Armory Show in New York.

With the outbreak of World War One Gleizes joined the army and was sent to Toul, where he was spared direct combat and was assigned to organize entertainment for the troops. With Cubism itself under seige as a "boche" tendency during the war, Jean Cocteau, who Gleizes met in the spring of 1914, defended the cause of the new painting in his wartime review Le Mot . Following his release from the military in 1915, Gleizes married Juliette Roche, and the couple soon emigrated to New York, where they were met by Marcel Duchamp. During his American sojourn and a brief stay in Barcelona in 1916, Gleizes introduced urban imagery and Spanish themes into his work, developing a bright palette and incorporating flat, luminous planes of pure color that owe a clear debt to Robert Delaunay.

Upon his return to Paris from New York in April 1919, Gleizes participated in the postwar "retour à l'ordre." His approach to form and color was increasingly austere, geometric and classicizing, in line with the painters and sculptors who were sponsored by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg (1879-1947), although Gleizes adamantly rejected the idea of a Cubist "group style." Nonetheless, in 1920 Gleizes participated in a revival of the prewar Cubists' Section d'Or exhibition, and defended the cause of geometric abstraction in articles and public statements, including a polemic waged against the Parisian Dada group that year. Over the next few years, Gleizes consolidated his style, advancing a quasi-scientific method of pictorial construction in a series of articles he published in La Vie des Letres et des Arts , and in a theoretical tract entitled Du Cubisme et les Moyens de le comprendre . His fame continued to grow, and in 1921 Gleizes began to mentor an international coterie of artists, including the Irish painters Evie Hone (1895-1955) and Mainie Jellet (1897-1944). Gleizes's position as a teacher encouraged him to further clarify his thoughts in new essays on the nature of planar construction, including La Peinture et ses Lois of 1924. In 1925 Gleizes's writings and pedagogical activities attracted the attention of the Bauhaus faculty in Dessau, who invited him to edit a new book on Cubism, which was published in 1928. Three years later, Gleizes's continued commitment to geometric figuration and international abstract art led him to join the newly-founded Abstraction-Création group, under whose auspices he prepared, in 1933, a monograph on the work of Robert Delaunay, crediting his friend and colleague with being the first artist to fully understand the intrinsic relation of form and movement in abstract painting. The book, however, was never published.

Gleizes's study of Delaunay propelled him to reevaluate his own means as a painter and to explore the possibility of a new kind of geometric figuration. His deep understanding of the planar nature of the pictorial support allowed him to extend his researches into mural painting. In 1935 Gleizes and Delaunay both participated in the first Salon de l'Art mural, and in 1937 Gleizes produced murals for the Pavillion de l'Air and the Pavillion de l'Union, along with Delaunay, Léger, and Léopold Survage (1879-1968) for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, employing a Cubist language to articulate the theme of modern aviation. The following year Gleizes continued to act on behalf of the viability of Cubist painting, organizing exhibitions at the Petit Palais and the Salon d'Automne, and executing a series of mural decorations for the Salon des Tuileries along with Delaunay. Gleizes's public work not only gained the approbation of critics, but secured him the patronage of Solomon R. Guggenheim at this time.

The outbreak of World War Two confirmed Gleizes's long-held belief that in an age of secular materialism political society must submit to a higher spiritual authority. He began to express these beliefs in a series of semi-abstract paintings on religious themes that he produced throughout the 1940s. Although he received the sacrament of baptisme in 1941, Gleizes's "conversión" to Catholicism was not dogmatic. His faith in the spiritual unity of man, his belief in the communal values of mural painting, and his interest in folk and popular art were all of a kind, and Gleizes pursued these interests organically. Gleizes's involvement with religious imagery and his contact with clerics and historians in turn rekindled his interest in medieval art and the model of an organic, spiritual society that he had espoused in his earliest writings. Once again, he expressed his position in book form, publishing in 1950 a new tract entitled Pensées sur l'homme et Dieu .

In his final years Gleizes received the official recognition he had long deserved. In 1951 he was asked to be a juror for the prestigious Prix de Rome. That same year he received the Grand Prix at the Menton Biennale, and was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest honor. Despite failing health - Gleizes lost vision in his right eye in 1950 - the artist continued his researches into the correspondence of form and spatial rhythm, embarking on a new series of paintings called "Arabesques" while continuing to pursue his interest in religious art in a series of works for a Jesuit chapel in Chantilly and a church in La Ciotat. The former project was completed by a group of students who participated in the so-called Atelier de la Rose, while the latter project never materialized, although Gleizes's preparatory studies survive. Gleizes died in June 1953 due to complications from prostate surgery.