Albert Gleizes
(b Paris, 8 Dec 1881; d Avignon, 23
June 1953).
French painter, printmaker and writer. He grew up in Courbevoie, a suburb
of Paris, and as a student at the Collège Chaptal became interested in
theatre and painting. At 19, his father put him to work in the family
interior design and fabric business, an experience that contributed to a
lifelong respect for skilled workmanship. The first paintings he
exhibited, at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1902, were
Impressionist in character, but the work accepted within two years at the
Salon d’Automne showed a shift to social themes, a tendency that
accelerated until 1908. Compulsory military service from 1903 to 1905
thrust him into the company of working-class people, arousing a permanent
sense of solidarity with their aspirations and needs. The results were
immediately apparent in the Association Ernest Renan, which he helped to
establish in 1905, a kind of popular university with secular and socialist
aims. He was also one of the founders of a community of intellectuals
based near Paris, the ABBAYE DE CRÉTEIL, which functioned from November
1906 to February 1908. He remained interested during these years in social
art, but his paintings became flatter and more sombre, more simplified and
with an increased emphasis on structure. Through the circle of poets
associated with the Abbaye de Créteil, Gleizes met Henri Le Fauconnier,
whose portrait of Pierre-Jean Jouve (1909; Paris, Pompidou) made a
decisive impression on him, confirming his exploration of volume. His
friends soon included Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, with whom he
exhibited alongside Le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger at the Salon d’Automne
in 1910; the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote disparagingly of their ‘pallid’
cubes. The five artists, plus Marie Laurencin, encouraged by Guillaume
Apollinaire, Roger Allard, Alexandre Mercereau and Jacques Nayral,
determined to group themselves together at the Salon des Indépendants in
1911. Manipulating the rules and helping to elect Le Fauconnier chairman
of the hanging committee, they showed together in a separate room, marking
the emergence of CUBISM. Gleizes’s portrait of Jacques Nayral (oil
on canvas, 1.62*1.14 m, 1910–11; London, Tate), one of his first major
Cubist works, dates from this period.
