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Paisaje de Bermudas, 1917

On September 11, 1915 Gleizes, accompanied by his bride Juliette Roche, who he had married in August 1915, left Paris for New York. Having been discharged from his military service in Toul, France, Gleizes decided to wait out the war in the United States. Like so many of his compatriots, Gleizes found himself in the unlikely position of self-imposed exile. Members of his intimate circle of artist-friends - Francis Picabia, Marie Laurencin, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Marcel Duchamp - had similarly chosen to leave Paris, settling in New York, Barcelona, Madrid and Portugal for varying periods of time. The infamous group of Cubist painters who had scandalized the Parisian art world just a few years earlier - Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp, Ramond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, and Marie Laurencin - had disbanded, and Gleizes, one of the leading spokesmen for the group, now found himself displaced on terra nova.

Gleizes and Juliette Roche were on the move throughout the war years. In May 1916 the couple returned to Europe, settling briefly in Barcelona, where Gleizes celebrated his first one-man exhibition, at the Galeries Dalmau (29 November - 12 December 1916), passing the summer in Tossa de Mar with Picabia, his wife Gabrielle Buffet, and Marie Laurencin. Early in January 1917 Gleizes returned with Roche to New York, with a brief visit to Cuba upon Picabia's insistence, and shortly thereafter the couple made a short trip to Bermuda. During the long sea journeys between destinations, Gleizes had the time to reflect on his art and ideas, committing his thoughts to paper in the form of poetry and prose, in addition to publishing a short article in Picabia's New York review 391, where he drew a sharp distinction between the work of Picasso and Braque and that of the "Salon" Cubists.

The landscapes Gleizes executed in Bermuda, and indeed his urban scenes of New York, are characterized by a return to the organizational principles the artist had developed in the years 1912-13. Whereas Gleizes's paintings of 1914 and 1915 demonstrate a preoccupation with defining the broad masses of the pictorial surface, with a newly heightened palette characterized by flat plans of color and/or luminous arcs and circular disks that fan out from the center centrifugally, in much of the work Gleizes produced in New York and Bermuda a strong linear scaffold is prominent. In Paisaje de Bermuda that grid-like structure acts like an armature that holds the landscape elements to the pictorial surface, forming a network of largely vertical and horizontal axes that reassert the framing edges of the canvas and divide the picture plane into discrete pockets of space. Paisaje de Bermuda has a looser and more open structure than the other landscapes Gleizes executed on the island, a result perhaps of the mixed technique he employed and the nature of the cardboard support. Here, Gleizes's talents as a draftsman are fully evident, as the linear structure defines the vertical ascension of trees, the contours of hills and foliage, and the rudimentary outlines of houses nestled in a valley, with a view onto the distant sea and sky. Employing the devices of Cézannist passage to good effect, Gleizes opens up the contours of the individual landscape elements, allowing the eye of the viewer to weave in and out of the space, and vertically up and laterally across the picture plane. The facture is correspondingly loose and the palette somewhat restrained, recalling once again the late work of Cézanne, in which the spatial properties of color are held in check. Similarly, forms are spread out evenly across the surface of the canvas, unlike the vestigial illusionism that is still present in the High Analytic Cubist work of Picasso and Braque of 1911-12, where there is a greater massing of form in the center, although Gleizes shares with them an articulated visual ambiguity.

It is tempting to relate Gleizes's approach to form in the Bermuda paintings to specific works he may have seen in Barcelona, especially the post-Cézannist landscapes Joaquim Sunyer executed in Mallorca during the war years, with which they bear a stylistic affinity. It is more likely, however, that Gleizes adapted his technique to the specificity of the environments in which he worked. The New York urban landscapes communicate the bustling energy of the city through the superposition of transparent planes and the incorporation of words, while the series of "Spanish Dancers" Gleizes produced in Barcelona conveys the rhythmic movement of dance and music through concentric bands of color. Indeed, Gleizes, who is often described as a dogmatic and systematic painter, a man of theorems, expressed the need to remain flexible in his approach in his writings from this period. In an unpublished manuscript written during his travels, he insisted:

We are in the age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, actions, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallised the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilised in his picture. The painting of today must crystallise a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system; it surprises through the unforeseen and is re-newed by it. We should regard "the system" with suspicion. It limits our possibilities. How, for example, can we give the quivalent of the enormous "Broadway" - that fantastic river with a thousand currents going against each other, interweaving, rising up over its banks - if, in our painter's expression, we apply little principles just about good enough to describe a very simple object, an inkstand, a box, etc. With one blow, the truth blinds us and rises up to scatter the system's charm.

Upon his return to Paris in April 1919, however, Gleizes would reevaluate his position on artistic spontaneity.

INSCRIPTIONS

Firmado en el ángulo inferior izquierdo. «Alb.Gleizes»

Galería Melki, París / Colección J. Helft y herederos, Buenos Aires.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rencontres d'art, Hommage à Albert Gleizes, Montauban, Musée Ingres, 1973, rep. / VARICHON, A, Albert Gleizes, catalogue raisonné, Ed. Somogy-Fondation Albert Gleizes, vol.I 1998, nº cat. 800, rep. b/n p. 271.

(1) Albert Gleizes , « La Peinture Moderne», 391 (Nueva York), nº 5 (junio de 1917), pp. 6-7.

(2) Albert Gleizes , Les voyages que je viens de faire en Canada, Açores, Portugal, Espagne... ('Les voyages que je viens de faire en Canada, Açores, Portugal, Espagne...,'), unpublished manuscript; cited in Peter Brook Albert Gleizes. For and Against the Twentieth Century, New Haven and Londres, Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 54-55.