56 Facts About Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris.

Albert Gleizes was a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration.

Albert Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.

Albert Gleizes was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Creteil.

Albert Gleizes exhibited regularly at Leonce Rosenberg's Galerie de l'Effort Moderne in Paris; he was a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Creation.

Albert Gleizes was the nephew of Leon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome.

The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery.

Finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Albert Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army then began pursuing a career as a painter.

Albert Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition.

Albert Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine a Asnieres was exhibited at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902.

In 1905 Albert Gleizes was among the founders of l'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda.

Albert Gleizes was in charge of the Section litteraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings.

In 1908 Albert Gleizes exhibited at the Toison d'Or in Moscow.

From 1910 onwards, Albert Gleizes was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and a principal theorist of the movement.

Albert Gleizes showed his Portrait de Rene Arcos and L'Arbre, two paintings in which the emphasis on simplified form had already begun to overwhelm the representational interest of the paintings.

Albert Gleizes exhibited at the 1910 Salon d'Automne with the same artists, followed by the first organized group showing by Cubists, in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Independants together with Metzinger, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Leger.

At the 1911 Salon d'Automne, Albert Gleizes exhibited his Portrait de Jacques Nayral and La Chasse, with, in addition to the group of Salle 41, Andre Lhote, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye and Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Albert Gleizes exhibited his Les Baigneuses at the 1912 Salon des Independants; a show marked by Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2, which itself caused a scandal even amongst the Cubists.

At the Salon d'Automne of 1912 Albert Gleizes exhibited L'Homme au Balcon, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Albert Gleizes had argued that we cannot know the external world, we can only know our sensations.

Albert Gleizes's subjects were of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning.

Albert Gleizes' iconography helps to explain why there is no period in his work corresponding to analytic Cubism, and how it was possible for Albert Gleizes to become an abstract painter, more theoretically in tune with Kandinsky and Mondrian than Picasso and Braque, who remained associated with visual reality.

Albert Gleizes' intent was to reconstitute and synthesize the real world according to his individual consciousness, through the use of volumes to convey the solidity and structure of objects.

Albert Gleizes's concern was to establish weight, density and volumetric relationships among sections of a broad subject.

Albert Gleizes was put in charge of organizing entertainment for the troops and as a result was approached by Jean Cocteau to design the set and costumes for the William Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Georges Valmier.

In effect, writes Robbins, "Albert Gleizes would have inverted Courbet's "Show me an angel and I will paint you an angel" to be "As long as an angel remains an unembodied ideal and cannot be shown to me, I'll paint it.

Paris was overshadowed by a strong reaction against those visions of common effort and revolutionary construction which Albert Gleizes continued to embrace, while the avant-garde was characterized by the anarchic and, to him, destructive spirit of Dada.

The polemic resulted in the publication of Du cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 by Painting and its Laws, within which appear the notion of translation and rotation that would ultimately characterize both the pictorial and theoretical aspects of Gleizes' art.

Albert Gleizes was in nearly every sense a maverick Cubist, perhaps the most unyielding of them all; both in his paintings and writings.

Albert Gleizes developed a single-minded, thoroughly uncompromising Cubism without the diversion of a classical alternative.

Albert Gleizes's art was indeed backed by a prodigious theoretical effluence, most notably in La Peinture et ses lois.

Albert Gleizes fused aesthetic, metaphysical, moral and social priorities to describe the status and function of art.

The problem set out by Albert Gleizes was to replace anecdote as a starting point for the work of art, by the sole means of using the elements of the painting itself: line, form and color.

Space and rhythm, according to Albert Gleizes, are perceptible by the extent of movement of planar surfaces.

II obtain mechanically, Albert Gleizes writes, with minimal personal initiative, a "plastic spatial and rhythmic system", by the conjugation of simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the plane and from the movements of translation of the plane to one side.

Albert Gleizes described how artists had freed themselves from the 'subject-image' as a pretext to work from the 'subjectless-image' until they came together.

Albert Gleizes had never ceased to call himself a Cubist and theoretically a Cubist he remained.

In Du Cubisme et les moyens de comprendre, Albert Gleizes went so far as to envisage the mass-production of painting; as a means of undermining the market system and thus the status of artworks as commodities.

The new polemic resulted in the publication of Du cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 by La Peinture et ses lois.

The Albert Gleizes' spent more and more time at the family home in Serrieres, in Cavalaire, and an even quieter location on the French Riviera, both associating with people more sympathetic to their social ideas.

Albert Gleizes became active in the Union Intellectuelle and lectured extensively in France, Germany, Poland and England, while continuing to write.

In 1927, still dreaming of the communal days at the Abbaye de Creteil, Albert Gleizes founded an artist's colony at a rented house called the Moly-Sabata in Sablons near his wife's family home in Serrieres in the Ardeche departement in the Rhone Valley.

In 1934 Albert Gleizes began a series of paintings that would continue for several years, in which three levels are identified: static translation, corresponding to his researches of the 1920s; mobile rotation, corresponding to his researches into coloured cadences of the late 1920s and early 1930s; and simple grey arcs which, Albert Gleizes argues, gives the 'form' or unifying 'rhythm' of the painting.

In 1937, Albert Gleizes was commissioned to paint murals for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the Paris World's Fair.

Albert Gleizes collaborated with the Delaunays in the Pavillon de l'Air and with Leopold Survage and Fernand Leger for the Pavillon de l'Union des Artistes Modernes.

Albert Gleizes brought these works to the United States which today form part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Albert Gleizes did believe in the Roman catholic church and even considered himself a catholic dating back to the 1920s.

Albert Gleizes believed that the church had lost its "spirit" since the rise of scholastic philosophy and representational art in the thirteenth century.

In 1942 Albert Gleizes began the series of Supports de Contemplation, large scale, entirely non-representational paintings that are both very complex and very serene.

Materials being difficult to obtain during the war, Albert Gleizes painted on burlap, sizing the porous material with a mixture of glue and paint.

Albert Gleizes had used burlap in some of his earliest paintings and now found it favorable to his vigorous touch, for it took the most powerful strokes even while preserving the matte surface he so valued.

In 1952, Albert Gleizes realized his last major work, a fresco titled Eucharist that he painted for a Jesuit chapel in Chantilly.

Albert Gleizes died in Avignon in the Vaucluse departement on 23 June 1953 and was interred in his wife's family mausoleum in the cemetery at Serrieres.

Albert Gleizes never repeated his earlier styles, never remained stationary, but always grew more intense, more passionate.

Albert Gleizes's is an abstract art of deep significance and meaning, paradoxically human even in his very search for absolute order and truth.

Albert Gleizes, untitled, drawing, published in the cover of Der Sturm, 5 June 1920.