Cubism Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes ( 8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953) was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also 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. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He 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 Créteil. Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, e.g., La Peinture et ses lois (Paris, 1923), Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris, 1932) and Homocentrisme (Sablons, 1937).

In Du "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger wrote: "If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems." Cubism itself, then, was not based on any geometrical theory, but corresponded better to non-Euclidean geometry than classical or Euclidean geometry. The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective; an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension. Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself." In contrast to Picasso and Braque, Gleizes' intent was not to analyze and describe visual reality. Gleizes had argued that we cannot know the external world, we can only know our sensations. Objects from daily life⎯guitar, pipe or bowl of fruit⎯ did not satisfy his complex idealistic concepts of the physical world. His subjects were of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning. Gleizes' iconography (as of Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger) helps to explain why there is no period in his work corresponding to analytic Cubism, and how it was possible for Gleizes to become an abstract painter, more theoretically in tune with Kandinsky and Mondrian than Picasso and Braque, who remained associated with visual reality

 Gleizes' intent was to reconstitute and synthesize the real world according to his individual consciousness (sensations), through the use of volumes to convey the solidity and structure of objects. Their weight, placement and effects upon each other, and the inseparability of form and color, was one of the principal lessons of Cézanne. Forms were simplified and distorted, each shape and color modified by another, rather than splintered. His concern was to establish weight, density and volumetric relationships among sections of a broad subject. Gleizes himself characterized the 1910–11 phase of his work as an "analysis of volume relationships," though it bears little relation to the traditional use of the word "analytical" in our understanding of Cubism.
  "We laugh out loud when we think of all the novices who expiate their literal understanding of the remarks of a cubist and their faith in absolute truth by laboriously placing side by side the six faces of a cube and both ears of a model seen in profile." (Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger)Wikipedia

Jean Metzinger

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger (June 24, 1883 – November 3, 1956) was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes, developed the theoretical foundations of Cubism.His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the Neo-impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.Wikipedia

 He began painting when very young, by 1900 he was a student at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, where he worked under the portrait painter Hippolyte Touront.
After sending three pictures to the Salon Des Indépendants in 1903, he moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale. Thus, from the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter, a fact that may account for some of the shifts to which his art submitted in later years. He exhibited regularly in Paris from 1903, taking part in 1904 in a group show with Touront and Raoul Dufy at the gallery run by Berthe Weill and also participating in the Salon d'Automne in that year.

By 1906 he had enough prestige to be elected to the hanging committee of the Salon Des Indépendants. By the time he began dating his works around 1905 he was an ardent participant in the Neo-Impressionist revival led by Henri Edmond Cross and Seurat , he arrived at Cubism via Neo-Impressionism and Fauvism.
Around 1912-23, at the height of the Cubist struggle, Metzinger was without a doubt the member of the group best known to the public, as well as the most representative ('Jean Metzinger seems to be the most far-sighted and skillful of the Cubist militants, aside from Picasso, who was the great discoverer of a new form', André Salmon, Paris-Journal, 19 March 1912).

After the First World War Metzinger - like Picasso and Braque, - turned increasingly to traditional subjects in response to growing interest in the classical tradition. Time has not been kind to this judgment and even Apollinaire, one senses, was ill at ease in his defense: 'A painting by Metzinger always contains its own explanation. This is perhaps a noble weakness...'.Although Metzinger's laborious Cubism is no longer so seductive, he remains known as one of its most perceptive theoreticians. He collaborated with Albert Gleizes on the theoretical work published in the book "Du Cubisme/On Cubism" (Paris, 1912).(Marblearch Gallery)

 

Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner (November 11, 1901 - April 16, 1978) was a German-American painter.
Richard Lindner was born in Hamburg, Germany. His mother Mina Lindner was American and born in New York as daughter of German parents.
In 1905 the family moved to Nuremberg, where Lindner's mother was owner of a custom-fitting corset business and Richard Lindner grew up and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School since 1940 Academy of Fine Arts). From 1924 to 1927 he lived in Munich and studied there from 1925 at the Kunstakademie. 

In 1927 Lindner moved to Berlin and stayed there until 1928, when he returned to Munich to become art director of a publishing firm. He remained in Munich until 1933, when he was forced to flee to Paris. Once in Paris, Lindner became politically engaged, sought contact with French artists and earned his living as a commercial artist. He was interned when World War II broke out in 1939 and later served in the French Army.
In 1941, Lindner moved to the United States and worked in New York City as an illustrator of books and magazines. There he made contact with New York artists and German emigrants such as Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, and Saul Steinberg. In 1948, Lindner became an American citizen.

"The artistic universe of Richard Lindner is unique: he is highly genuine, he is full of urban energy, and he is driven by weird eroticism...Richard Lindner started his career as an artist eventually at the age of 40 in New York. In this metropolitain jungle Lindner created his oeuvre: exciting and powerful images of robot like figures, amazons and heroines, harlequins of self-styled heroes - his artistic panorama of the unruly 60s and 70s of the 20th century" (sic) (Claus Clement quoted in: Richard Lindner - Paintings, Works on Paper, Graphic - Nuremberg 2001). One of Lindner's paintings, "Boy With Machine," 1954, appears on the cover-leaf of Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus, and thus the image has formed part of many readers' introduction to Deleuze's later and more accessible philosophy.Wikipedia

 

 

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Alice Bailly

Alice Bailly was one of Switzerland’s most radical painters in the early decades of the 20th century. By 1906, Bailly had settled in Paris, where she became friends with many avant-garde modernist painters, including Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin.
While she was exhibiting her early wood engravings in Paris, Fauvism came to the fore. Bailly was inspired by the style’s bold use of intense colors, dark outlines, and emphatically unrealistic anatomy and space. In 1908, her new paintings hung at the Salon d’Automne alongside the art of the principal Fauve painters.

 Continuing her stylistic experimentation, Bailly developed her own variation of Cubism. In 1912, her work was chosen to represent Switzerland in a traveling exhibition seen in Russia, England, and Spain. When World War I broke out, Bailly returned to Switzerland, where she invented “wool paintings,” mixed-media works in which short strands of colored yarn imitated brush strokes.

Bailly was briefly active in the Dada phenomenon. She moved to Lausanne in 1923 and stayed there the rest of her life, continuing to exhibit regularly and promote the cause of modern art. In 1936, Bailly accepted a commission to paint eight large murals for the foyer of the Theatre of Lausanne. This monumental task led to exhaustion, which presumably made Bailly more susceptible to the tuberculosis that claimed her life two years later. (National Museum of Women in the Arts)