Albert Gleizes - 13 Bauhaus Bücher, Albert Gleizes Kubismus - 1993

Book about the cubist stage of Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes was the son of Sylvain Gleizes, an industrial designer, and Elizabeth Valentine Commere; His uncle, Léon Commere, was a successful portrait painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1875.

He worked as an apprentice in his father's industrial design studio in Paris. Young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often snuck out of classes to spend time writing poetry and wandering the nearby Montmartre cemetery. Finally, after completing secondary education, Gleizes spent four years in the French army and then embarked on a career as a painter, first making landscapes.Its beginnings were impressionistic. He was only twenty-one years old when his work entitled La Seine à Asnières (The Seine at Asnières) was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year he participated in the first Salon d'Automne and soon fell under the influence by Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1907 Gleizes and some of his friends pursued the idea of ​​creating a self-sufficient community of artists that would allow him to develop his art free of all commercial concerns. For almost a year, in a large house in Créteil, Gleizes, along with other painters, poets, musicians and writers, gathered to create. Lack of income forced them to abandon the place in early 1908 and Gleizes temporarily moved to La Ruche, the artistic commune in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris.In 1910 he joined Cubism, of which he was one of its first and most important theorists along with Jean Metzinger. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris that year. Later he collaborated with Metzinger writing, in 1912, the work On Cubism and the Means to Understand It, providing it with theoretical and aesthetic bases. In the autumn of that year, together with Metzinger he joined the Puteaux Group, also known as Section d'Or, directed by Jacques Villon and his brother Marcel Duchamp. In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of painting to the American public at the Armory Show in New York.With the outbreak of World War I, Albert Gleizes enlisted in the French army. He was assigned the task of organizing entertainment for the troops, and as a result he was approached by Jean Cocteau to design the scenery and costumes for William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Discharged from the army in the fall of 1915, Gleizes and his new wife, Juliette Roche, daughter of a prominent and wealthy French statesman, moved to New York City. From there, the couple embarked for Barcelona where they were joined by Marie Laurencin plus Francis Picabia and his wife. The group spent the summer painting in the tourist area of ​​Tosa de Mar and in December Gleizes had his first solo exhibition of his works at the Galerias Dalmau in Barcelona. Upon returning to New York, Gleizes began writing poetic compositions in verse and prose. He traveled to Bermuda, where he painted a series of landscapes, but when the war ended in Europe, where his career evolved more towards teaching through his writing and he became involved in the committee of the Unions Intellectuelles Françaises.

In 1923 he published, now alone, the work Painting and its Laws, in which he announced the return of religious art and revalued medieval artistic production.Still dreaming of his commune days in Créteil, in 1927 he founded an artists' colony in a rental house called Moly-Sabata in Sablons near his wife's family home in Serrières in the Ardèche department in the Rhône Valley.

In 1931, Gleizes participated in the Abstraction-Création committee which acted as a forum for international non-representational art. By then, his work reflected the strengthening of his religious convictions and in his 1932 book, La Forme et l'histoire he examines Celtic, Romanesque, and Oriental art. Touring Poland and Germany, he gave lectures entitled Art et Religion, Art et Production and Art et Science and wrote a book on Robert Delaunay but it was never published. In 1937, Gleizes was hired to paint murals for the second category General Exhibition of Paris (1937) at the Paris World's Fair. He collaborated with Delaunay at the Pavillon de l'Air and with Léopold Survage and Fernand Léger at the Pavillon de l'Union des Artistes Modernes. In late 1938, Gleizes volunteered to participate in the free seminars and discussion groups created by Robert Delaunay in his Paris workshop.In the late 1930s, wealthy art aficionado Peggy Guggenheim purchased much new art in Paris, including works by Albert Gleizes. He took these works to the United States, and today they are part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection. During World War II, Gleizes and his wife remained in France under German occupation. His religious convictions deepened and at the end of the war he was hailed by some as the author who established the principles for the renewal of religious art. In 1948, Gleizes accepted the offer of a Casablanca publisher to create a series of drawings illustrating Blaise Pascal's Pensees sur l'Homme et Dieu. In 1951, he was appointed jury for the Rome Prize and the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor. In 1952, he made his last major work, a fresco titled Eucharist that he painted for the Jesuit chapel in Chantilly.

Albert Gleizes died in Avignon, Vaucluse in 1953 and was buried in his wife's family mausoleum in the Serrières cemetery.