Albert Gleizes

Sale: Collection of Madame Bourdon, Paris, 25 March 1990, lot 32
Private collection of Alain Delon, France

Varichon, Albert Gleizes: Catalogue Raisonné, Paris, 1998, vol.1, p. 178, no. 503 (illustrated)

Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Passions privées, December 1995-March 1996, no. A10'-2 (illustrated)
Barcelona, Musée Picasso, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Cubisme en Majesté, March-December 2001, no. 72 (illustrated)
Paris, L’Adresse Musée de la Poste - Musée de Lodève, Gleizes - Metzinger, From Cubism and After, May 2012-November 2013, p.88 (illustrated)

Mobilized in 1914, like many of his Cubist friends, Albert Gleizes was sent to a barracks in Toul, Lorraine, near the front line. Supported by a military doctor, Major Lambert, of whom he would paint an important portrait (now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York), Gleizes continued to draw and paint, but his working conditions were altered by his military obligations. He was soon reformed, thanks to the help of his future wife Juliette Roche, and left for New York. This city will be an upheaval of colours, sounds and vivacity.

This painting was created in Toul according to the precepts of cubism that he theorized with Metzinger and then completed shortly thereafter in 1915 in New York when he arrived. As a tribute to this fortified city threatened by the Germans but impregnable by the vision that the artist gives us, Gleizes makes it swirl with serenity and gives it back its colours that the war has faded. The work is vibrant and rhythmic by superimposed geometric forms that let us glimpse an evolution of the artist’s style towards abstraction. This spectacular composition is representative of the work Gleizes created during this period but it is also a rare witness to the personal and artistic life of one of the founding fathers of cubism.