Van Gogh Museum
The Van Gogh Museum is one of the many art museums in the Netherlands dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The Van Gogh House can be visited in a museum in Van Gogh's old residence. In the city of Tilburg, the old drawing room of Vincent van Gogh has been reconstructed. In the Van Gogh Town Nuenen you can see many monuments; the Vincetre is located in Nuenen, a Museum about the life of Van Gogh. The actual Van Gogh Museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough Amsterdam South, close to the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Concertgebouw; the museum opened on 2 June 1973. It is located in buildings designed by Kisho Kurokawa; the museum's collection is the largest collection of Van Gogh's drawings in the world. In 2017, the museum had 2.3 million visitors, was the most visited museum in the Netherlands and the 23rd most visited art museum in the world. Upon Vincent van Gogh's death in 1890, his work not sold fell into the possession of his brother Theo.
Theo died six months after Vincent, leaving the work in the possession of his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Selling many of Vincent's paintings with the ambition of spreading knowledge of his artwork, Johanna maintained a private collection of his works; the collection was inherited by her son Vincent Willem van Gogh in 1925 loaned to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam where it was displayed for many years, was transferred to the state-initiated Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962. Design for a Van Gogh Museum was commissioned by the Dutch government in 1963 to Dutch architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld. Rietveld died a year and the building was not completed until 1973, when the museum opened its doors. In 1998 and 1999, the building was renovated by the Dutch architect Martien van Goor and an exhibition wing by the Japanese modernist architect Kisho Kurokawa was added. Starting in late 2012, the museum was closed for renovations for six months. During this period, 75 works from the collection were shown in the Hermitage Amsterdam.
On 9 September 2013, the museum unveiled a long-lost Van Gogh painting that spent years in a Norwegian attic believed to be by another painter. It is the first full-size canvas by him discovered since 1928. Sunset at Montmajour depicts trees and sky, painted with Van Gogh's familiar thick brush strokes, it can be dated to the exact day it was painted because he described it in a letter to his brother and said he painted it the previous day 4 July 1888. In 1991, twenty paintings were stolen from the museum, among them Van Gogh's early painting The Potato Eaters. Although the thieves escaped from the building, 35 minutes all stolen paintings were recovered from an abandoned car. Three paintings – Wheatfield with Crows, Still Life with Bible, Still Life with Fruit – were torn during the theft. Four men, including two museum guards, were convicted for the theft and given six or seven-year sentences, it is considered to be the largest art theft in the Netherlands since the Second World War. In 2002, two paintings were stolen from the museum, Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen and View of the Sea at Scheveningen.
Two Dutchmen were convicted for the theft to four-and-a-half-year sentences, but the paintings were not recovered. The museum offered a reward of €100,000 for information leading to the recovery of the paintings; the FBI Art Crime Team listed the robbery on their Top Ten Art Crimes list, estimates the combined value of the paintings at US$30 million. In September 2016, both paintings were discovered by the Guardia di Finanza in Italy; the two artworks were found according to the Van Gogh Museum. The museum is situated at the Museumplein in Amsterdam-Zuid, on the Paulus Potterstraat 7, between the Stedelijk Museum and the Rijksmuseum; the museum consists of two buildings, the Rietveld building, designed by Gerrit Rietveld, the Kurokawa wing, designed by Kisho Kurokawa. The museum offices are housed on Stadhouderskade 55 in Amsterdam-Zuid; the Rietveld building exhibits the permanent collection. The building is four stories high. On the ground floor are a shop, a café, the introductory part of the art exhibition.
The first floor shows the works of Van Gogh grouped chronologically. The second floor gives information about the restoration of paintings and has a space for minor temporary exhibitions; the third floor shows paintings of Van Gogh's contemporaries in relationship to the work of Van Gogh himself. The Kurokawa wing is used for major temporary exhibitions; the building is three stories high. The entrance to the Kurokawa wing is via an underground tunnel from the Rietveld building; the Van Gogh Museum has the largest Van Gogh collection in the world. It comprises 200 paintings, 400 drawings, 700 letters by Vincent van Gogh; the main exhibition chronicles the various phases of Van Gogh's artistic life. His selected works from Nuenen: Avenue of Poplars in Autumn The Potato Eaters His selected works from Antwerp: Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette His selected works from Paris: Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin Wheat Field with a Lark View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic His selected works from Arles: The Zouave Bedroom in Arles The Yellow House Sunflowers His selected works from Saint-Rémy: Almond Blossoms And his selected works from Auvers-sur-Oise: Wheatfield with Crows The permanent
Auguste Herbin
Auguste Herbin was a French painter of modern art. He is best known for his Cubist and abstract paintings consisting of colorful geometric figures, he co-founded the groups Abstraction-Création and Salon des Réalités Nouvelles which promoted non-figurative abstract art. He was born in Nord, his father was a craftsman. He studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lille, from 1899 to 1901, when he settled in Paris; the initial influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism visible in paintings that he sent to the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 gave way to an involvement with Fauvism, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. He started to experiment with Cubism after his move in 1909 to the Bateau-Lavoir studios, where he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Otto Freundlich and Juan Gris, his work was exhibited in the same room as that of Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger in the Salon des Indépendants of 1910, in 1912 he participated in the influential Section d'Or exhibition.
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he was exempted from military service because of his short stature and was committed to work in an airplane factory near Paris. After producing his first abstract paintings in 1917, Herbin came to the attention of Léonce Rosenberg who, after World War I, made him part of the group centred on his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne and exhibited his work there on several occasions in March 1918 and 1921. Herbin's radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as Colored Wood Relief, challenged not only the status of the easel painting but traditional figure–ground relationships; the incomprehension that greeted these reliefs and related furniture designs from those critics most favorably disposed towards Cubism, was such that until 1926 or 1927 he followed Rosenberg's advice to return to a representational style and produced paintings in the New Objectivity style. Herbin himself disowned his landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes of this period, such as Bowls Players, in which the objects were depicted as schematized volumes.
Under the influence of surrealism, he became critical of the rational forms employed by De Stijl. After 1927 Herbin becomes interested by microphotographs of crystals and plants and abandons figurative painting. In the 1930s, he co-founded the group Abstraction-Création in Paris and served as publisher and author for the journal Abstraction-Création. Art non figurativ. In the second issue of the journal he wrote against oppression of all kinds; as a member of the Communist Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires he signed a statement against the political indifference of artists. Critical of Stalinism, he left the Communist party in the 1940s. Beginning in 1942, Herbin developed a language of form and color, his "alphabet plastique", his paintings consist only of colorful arrangements of triangles and rectangles. In 1946 he was one of the founders of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a successor of Abstraction-Création, he served as the group's vice-president. After 1953 Herbin was paralyzed on the right side.
He died in Paris on 31 January 1960. One painting remained unfinished—the motif of the painting was constructed on the word Fin. During the 2000s an important series of original Herbin's signed rugs have been realised by Didier Marien from the Boccara Gallery with the agreement of the rights holders; those rugs exhibited in France, but in Moscow and New York played a key role in the worldwide rediscovery of Auguste Herbin's artistic creations. Among the public collections holding works by Auguste Herbin are: Museum de Fundatie, The Netherlands National Galleries of Scotland Matisse Museum, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark Museum of Modern Art, France Culture.gouv.fr, Base Mémoire, La Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées Artistic rugs of Auguste Herbin with the Boccara Gallery
Georges Braque
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, draughtsman and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso, their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso. Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Val-d'Oise, he grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902; the next year, he attended the Académie Humbert in Paris, painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Francis Picabia. Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style.
The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, home to Le Havre to paint. In May 1907, he exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants; the same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had died in 1906 and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism. Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective, he conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions.
In his village scenes, for example, Braque reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work with Pablo Picasso, developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.” Braque’s essential subject is the ordinary objects he has known forever. Picasso celebrates animation. Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque residents of Montmartre, Paris.
These artists were the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism. A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique. On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes". Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" after seeing a painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.
The term'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described Cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas." The Cubist style spread throughout Paris and Europe. The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness, he was trepanned, required a long period of recuperation. The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, if they were, no one would understand them anymore, it was like being roped together on a mountain. Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism.
He developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his e
Bart van der Leck
Bart van der Leck was a Dutch painter and ceramicist. With Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian he founded the De Stijl art movement. Son of a house painter, he started his career learning how to make stained glass in a shop in Utrecht. An example of his stained glass work is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Hoge Veluwe, Netherlands. After having met Mondrian and van Doesburg and having founded the Stijl movement with them, his style became abstract, as did Mondrian's, but after disagreements with Mondrian his abstract style became based on representational images. His painting Tryptich is an example, in which he transformed sketches of a mine in Spain into abstract shapes. In 1919-1920 he created the interior design for St Hubertus Hunting Lodge, in the Hoge Veluwe estate; the hunting lodge was designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage. In 1930, he was commissioned by Jo de Leeuw, owner of the prestigious Dutch department store Metz & Co. to design interiors, window packaging and advertising. For these print materials van der Leck developed a rectilinear, geometrically constructed alphabet.
In 1941, he designed a typeface based on this alphabet for the avant garde magazine Flax. Architype van der Leck, a digital revival of that face by David Quary and Freda Sack of The Foundry, was released in 1994. Bart van der Leck claimed to be the father of the avant-garde movement. In his own words he said: "Mondrian came to my place one day with Doesburg, whom I had never seen before; when Doesburg noticed an abstract painting right on the easel, he exlaimed:'If, to be the painting of the future, may I be hanged right now!' Well, a few months he was painting in that manner. That's the sort of person Doesburg was. No ideas of his own, and a cheat in bargain..." Among the public collections holding works by the artist are: Museum de Fundatie, The Netherlands Kröller-Müller Museum Haley, Allen. Type: Hot Designers Make Cool Fonts. Rockport Publishers Inc, Gloucester. ISBN 1-56496-317-9 Hoek, Marleen Blokhuis, Ingrid Goovaerts, Natalie Kamphuys, et al. Theo van Doesburg: Oeuvre Catalogus. Centraal Museum: 2000.
ISBN 90-6868-255-5. Toos van Kooten. Bart van der Leck. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 1994. Short biography at Codart Longer biography at Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis Works in the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
Le Chahut
Le Chahut is a Neo-Impressionist painting by Georges Seurat, dated 1889-90. It was first exhibited at the 1890 Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, where it eclipsed other works. Chahut became the prime target of art critics, was discussed among Symbolist critics; the painting—representing a quadrille at the Moulin Rouge—influenced the Fauves, Cubists and Orphists. In the collection of French Symbolist poet and art critic Gustave Kahn, Chahut is located at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. Le Chahut is an oil painting on canvas measuring 170 by 141 cm. Seurat employed a Divisionist style, with pointillist dots of color; the work is dominated by a color scheme that tends toward the red end of the spectrum, of earth tones that draw from a palette of browns, warm grays, blues, interspersed with not just the primary colors, nor with the six principal colors, but with eighteen mixtures on his palette prior to application on the canvas. A deeper blue border painted around the edge of the canvas culminates in a shallow arch on the upper edge.
Le Chahut is a conspicuous example of Seurat’s pointillist technique. The modulation of light and shadow throughout the work is obtained by the use of small dots of color juxtaposed side by side while alternating in both intensity and concentrations; the dots are meant to fuse in the eye of the viewer to create the impression of mixed colors when observed from a distance. While the Impressionists had focused their attention on the harmony of colors based on similar or related hues, the Neo-Impressionists harmony had been based on contrasting hues, pitted one against the other; the painting is divided into three principal spaces. Musicians occupy the lower left section, one of whom is centrally located, his back turned toward the viewer, with his double-bass erected to the left. A row of dancers, two women and two men with their legs raised, they are characterized by curves and rhythmic repetition, creating a synthetic sense of dynamical movement. The background consists of ornate cabaret-style lighting fixtures, a few members of the audience sitting in the front row, their eyes fixed on the performance.
On the lower right another client is staring with a sidelong glance, indicative of sexual desire or sly and malicious intent. Chahut is an alternative name for the can-can, a provocative, sexually charged dance that first appeared in the ballrooms of Paris around 1830; the style of dance caused a scandal due to the other gestures of the arms and legs. Leading up to the 1890s, the dance transited from individuals in ballrooms to stage performances by a chorus line in such places as the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. "Compared with Degas's Café-concert", writes art historian Robert Herbert, "the kind of work presaging Seurat's, the Chahut dancers are lined up with the repetitive rhythms of ornamental art. Parallel to the surface rather than spiraling into depth, they tilt or unfold in staccato bursts that jump in our vision. Indeed since the exhibition of Baignade six years earlier, in 1884, Seurat had progressively flattened his major compositions and increased the number of small accents typical of decorative art, such as zigzags, darting curves, flaring rays, repeated parallels, nonreceding flat zones."Seurat focuses on an upward movement of lines throughout the painting—"an complicated machinery of lines" writes art historian John Rewald—giving the illusion of a high-spirited ambience of both dance and music.
The caricatural figures are treated imposingly, with humor and gaiety. The anti-naturalist tone of Chahut, with its primacy of expression over appearance and its eloquent use of lines and color, reflects the influence of both Charles Blanc and Humbert de Superville. Humbert's theory inspired Blanc's idea; the direction of a line changes the expression, are therefore signs of emotion. Horizontal lines are synonymous with calmness, by association with equilibrium and wisdom, while expansive lines embody gaiety, by virtue of their association with expansion and voluptuousness. Chahut's voluptuous expression and upward linear schematic embodies the Humbert-Blanc qualities and features of gaiety. Seurat makes use, too, of Charles Henry's theories on the emotional and symbolic expression of lines and colors, the works of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood on complementary colors. Seurat was influenced by Japanese prints, the graphic works of Jules Chéret. While Seurat acknowledges Henry as an influence for his "esthétique", Humbert's and Blanc are not mentioned.
Though in theory Seurat pays debt to his predecessors, in practice Chahut stands apart. Its forms are not abstract, but schematic and recognizable as the popular social milieu within which Seurat had been plunged since his move to Montmartre in 1886. Jules Christophe, Seurat's friend who interviewed him for a short biography published in spring 1890, described Le Chahut as the end of a fanciful quadrille on the stage of a Montmartre cafe-concert: a spectator, half show-off, half randy investigator, who smells, one might say, with an em
Gino Severini
Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Rome, he was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked including mosaic and fresco, he showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, won art prizes from major institutions. Severini was born into a poor family in Italy, his father was his mother a dressmaker. He studied at the Scuola Tecnica in Cortona until the age of fifteen, when he was expelled from the entire Italian school system for the theft of exam papers. For a while he worked with his father, it was there that he first showed a serious interest in art, painting in his spare time while working as a shipping clerk. With the help of a patron of Cortonese origins he attended art classes, enrolling in the free school for nude studies and a private academy, his formal art education ended after two years when his patron stopped his allowance, declaring, "I do not understand your lack of order."
In 1900 he met the painter Umberto Boccioni. Together they visited the studio of Giacomo Balla, where they were introduced to the technique of Divisionism, painting with adjacent rather than mixed colors and breaking the painted surface into a field of stippled dots and stripes; the ideas of Divisionism had a great influence on Severini's early work and on Futurist painting from 1910 to 1911. Severini settled in Paris in November 1906; the move was momentous for him. He said "The cities to which I feel most bound are Cortona and Paris: I was born physically in the first and spiritually in the second." He dedicated himself to painting. There he met most of the rising artists of the period, befriending Amedeo Modigliani and occupying a studio next to those of Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Suzanne Valadon, he knew most of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Lugné-Poe and his theatrical circle, the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, author Jules Romains.
The sale of his work did not provide enough to live on and he depended on the generosity of patrons. He was invited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Boccioni to join the Futurist movement and was a co-signatory, with Balla, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, of the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in February 1910 and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in April the same year, he was an important link between artists in France and Italy and came into contact with Cubism before his Futurist colleagues. Following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists adopted a sort of Cubism, which gave them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. Severini helped to organize the first Futurist exhibition outside Italy at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in February 1912 and participated in subsequent Futurist shows in Europe and the United States. In 1913, he had solo exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery and Der Sturm, Berlin. In his autobiography, written many years he records that the Futurists were pleased with the response to the exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, but that influential critics, notably Apollinaire, mocked them for their pretensions, their ignorance of the main currents of modern art and their provincialism.
Severini came to agree with Apollinaire. Severini was less attracted to the subject of the machine than his fellow Futurists and chose the form of the dancer to express Futurist theories of dynamism in art, he was adept at rendering lively urban scenes, for example in Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin and The Boulevard. During the First World War he produced some of the finest Futurist war art, notably his Italian Lancers at a Gallop and Armoured Train. In 1916 Severini departed from Futurism and painted several works in a naturalistic style inspired by his interest in early Renaissance art. After the First World War, Severini abandoned the Futurist style and painted in a synthetic Crystal Cubist style until 1920. By 1920 he was applying theories of classical balance based on the Golden Section to still lifes and figurative subjects from the traditional commedia dell'arte, he became part of the "return to order" in the arts in the post-war era. Works such as The Two Pulchinellas exemplify Severini's turn toward a more conservative, analytic type of painting, which nonetheless suggests metaphysical overtones.
After 1920, Severini divided his time between Rome. In 1921 he published Du cubisme au classicisme: Esthétique du compas et du nombre, a book summarizing his research into mathematical theories of harmony and proportion. In 1923 and 1925 he took part in the Rome Biennale, he exhibited in Milan with artists of the Novecento Italiano group in 1926 and 1929 and in their Geneva exhibition of 1929. From 1928 he began to incorporate elements of Rome's classical landscape in his work. In 1930 he took part in the Venice Biennale, exhibited in the Rome Quadrennials of 1931 and 1935, in 1935 won the first prize for painting, with an entire room devoted to his work, he contributed a cycle of works to the Paris Exhibition. He explored fresco and mosaic techniques and executed murals in various media in Switzerland and Italy. In the 1940s Severini's style became semi-abstract. In the 1950s he returned to his Futurist subjects: dancers and movement, he executed commissions for the church of Saint-Pierre in Freiburg and inaugurated the Conségna dell
Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes was a French artist, 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 a member of Der Sturm, his many theoretical writings were most appreciated in Germany, where at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, 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, both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Créteil. Gleizes exhibited at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, e.g. La Peinture et ses lois, Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire and Homocentrisme. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop.
He was the nephew of Léon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery. After completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition, his first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear inspired by Alfred Sisley or Camille Pissarro. Although related to Pissarro in technique, Gleizes' particular view-points as well as the composition and conception of early works represent a clear departure from the style of late Impressionism; the density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were noted by early critics. Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902.
The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of l'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components. Gleizes and others decide to create an association fraternelle d'artistes and rent a large house in Créteil; the Abbaye de Créteil was a self-supporting community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with other painters, poets and writers, gathered to create. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to 7 rue du Delta near Montmartre, with artists Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Doucet, Maurice Drouart and Geo Printemps.
In 1908 Gleizes exhibited at the Toison d'Or in Moscow. The same year, showing a great interest in color and reflecting the transient influence of Fauvism, the work of Gleizes became more synthetic with a proto-Cubist component. Gleizes' Fauve-like period was brief, lasting several months, when his paint was thickest and color brightest, his concern for structural rhythms and simplification was dominant, his geometric simplifications at this time were more akin to Pont-Aven School and Les Nabis principles than to Paul Cézanne. His landscapes of 1909 are characterized by the reducing of forms of nature to primary shapes. During the summer of the same year his style became linear and stripped, broken down into multiple forms and facets with attenuated colors, close to that of the painter Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1910 a group began to form which included Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay, they met at Henri le Fauconnier's studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Boulevard de Montparnasse.
These soirées would included writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Roger Allard, René Arcos, Paul Fort, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Alexandre Mercereau, Jules Romains and André Salmon. Together with other young painters, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color. From 1910 onwards, Albert Gleizes was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and principle theorist of the movement. Gleizes' evolvement in Cubism saw him exhibit at the twenty-sixth Salon des Indépendants in 1910, he showed his Portrait de René Arcos and L'Arbre, two paintings in which the emphasis on simplified form had begun to overwhelm the representational interest of the paintings. The same tendency is evident in Jean Metzinger's Portrait of Apollinaire in the same Salon; when Louis Vauxcelles wrote his initial review of the Salon he made a passing and imprecise reference to Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Henri le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes."Guillaume Apollinaire, in his account of the same salon at the Grand Palais remarked "with joy" that the general sense of the exhibition signifies "La déroute de l'impressionnisme," in reference to the works of a conspi
