Colecciones de arte

L'écolierc, 1925

Sometime in 1922 or 1923 - the date is not specified - Gleizes published "L'Etat du cubisme aujourd'hui" in La Vie des Lettres et des Arts, the same journal where La Peinture et ses Lois: Ce qui devait sortir du Cubisme had earlier appeared. The text was republished several years later in Tradition et Cubisme: Vers una Conscience Plastique, a new collection of essays spanning the years 1912-1924 in which Gleizes demonstrated his continuing preoccupation with defining and clarifying his ideas about modern painting.

If, however, in 1912 Gleizes promoted Cubism as a new development in Western painting in his influential treatise Du Cubisme, he now looked at the movement as a fait accompli, insisting that the reality of a new visual perception had become synonymous with the formal developments he had initiated with Metzinger and the Salon Cubists over a decade earlier. At the same time, Gleizes remained critical of the haste with which some of his contemporaries had appropriated aspects of the new style, transforming it into a question of individual taste and, even worse, falling into the trap of a "néo-classicisme sans issue."

Responding to the retour à l'ordre in French painting of the après-guerre, Gleizes insisted that Cubism must be subjected to general laws of pictorial organization in line with a new spirit in French culture and society, yet without a prescriptive formula. The implications of Cubism, in other words, extended far beyond questions of style and technique for Gleizes. In his words, "L'évolution qu'implique un tel processus n'embrasse pas seulement les moyens analytiques du spécialiste-peintre, mais surtout le fond général de l'homme lui-même."

There is no question that Gleizes's new pedagogical vocation had a decisive impact on his theoretical position. Over the course of 1922-24 Gleizes continued to refine his method in discussions with his students, while developing a mature style based on clear and structured compositional principles. Indeed, the very subject of an écolier immediately alerts us to Gleizes's position as both a teacher and a student of modern painting. Compared with Composition and Composition à la Guitarre (cat.nos. XX and XX), a new freedom with color and its complex spatial properties has entered Gleizes's work.

As the eye moves from the peripheries of the canvas to the center there is a corresponding shift in the value scale from dark brown, forest green, and teal blue, to red-orange, lime green, and cadmium yellow, establishing the effects of rhythmic progression and spatial movement. The complexity of form - transparent and opaque planes of unmodulated color of varying sizes and shapes - is undercut by the clarity and anchoring effects of large rectangular fields that are bisected by opposing orthogonal axes. Within this dominant contrapuntal structure, Gleizes defines secondary descriptive details - the eyes, nose, mouth, and hands of the écolier - whose contours are carefully repeated. Abandoning the last vestiges of Renaissance illusionism Gleizes subordinates form to the geometric logic of the canvas as a whole, defining space and rhythm in terms of planar construction and in relation to the flat surface of the picture plane. With its skillful economy of means, L'Ecolier is a paragon of Gleizes's mature style.

ORIGIN

Zlotowski Gallery, París

(1) Albert Gleizes, "L'Etat du cubisme aujourd'hui," La Vie des Lettres et des Arts (Paris), No.15 (1922 or 1923): pp.13-17.

(2) Albert Gleizes, Tradition et Cubisme: Vers una Conscience Plastique (Paris: J. Povlotzky et Cie., 1927): pp.217-224.

(3) Albert Gleizes, "L'Etat du cubisme aujourd'hui," in Tradition et Cubisme, p.220.

(4) Albert Gleizes, "L'Etat du cubisme aujourd'hui," in Tradition et Cubisme, p.220.