Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes – Early success as an impressionist landscape painter

Albert Gleizes was born in Paris on 8 December 1881; his uncle was the portrait painter Léon Comerre who had won the acclaimed Prix de Rome eight years earlier. After training as a technical draughtsman in his father’s business, he had early success in 1901 with his impressionist landscape paintings which he was able to present at the Société Nationale exhibitions. Greatly inspired by Paul Cézanne, the young artist soon moved away from descriptive painting towards geometric-abstract depictions. One of his first milestones were the so-called “Paysages classiques”.

Albert Gleizes as pioneer of Cubism

For a short while in 1910, Albert Gleizes joined a Cubist group around Robert Delauney, but soon found his own pictorial language which led him away from his previous artistic ties. This development was encouraged by his friends Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger, and it was with Metzinger that he wrote the epochal theoretical work “Du Cubisme” in 1912. His visionary style, which enriched early Cubism with its unprecedented dynamism, influenced many of his contemporaries. Gleizes finally found a spiritual home in the Cubist exhibition community “Section d’Or”, even though the Cubists’ work was not without criticism among critics and the public.

The First World War led Albert Gleizes out into the world

With the outbreak of the First World War, Albert Gleizes was called up for military service. However, through the contacts of his future wife, whose father was an influential member of the French government, Gleizes was spared the worst of the war and was able to travel overseas, including to the USA where he met with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. In 1916 he was bestowed a very special honour when the Galería Dalmau in Barcelona held his first exhibition. After the war, Gleizes and his wife returned to France where his career resumed its success. He renounced the gloomy tones of his early works and instead increasingly applied large areas of colour. Finally, in 1927, he founded the artist group Moly-Sabata and in 1937 produced resplendent murals for the Paris World Fair. Following the Second World War, Gleizes won the Grand Prix at the French Biennale in Menton in 1951.

Tendency towards religious themes

During the last few years of his life, Albert Gleizes discovered a new focus for his works and turned in particular to religious themes which he tried to translate into their own Cubist visual language. In the light of this, he studied extensively the religious art of the Middle Ages, which also left traces in his own work.

With his death on 23 June 1953 in Avignon, Albert Gleizes left behind not only an extensive oeuvre of a practical and theoretical nature, but above all a wide-open door to abstract art, of which he himself was one of the great pioneers. His paintings can be found in museums all over the world, and the Museum Estrine in Saint-Remy-de-Provence has held a permanent exhibition of his works since 2006.