Works by Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes wrote Du “Cubisme” with Jean Metzinger in 1912, the first major treatise on the movement, and painted bathers, a village, his publisher and New York's Brooklyn Bridge in planes that tilt and overlap.

Self-taught, he began painting around 1901 in the Impressionist manner. By 1909 he could reduce a reclining man in a hat to a few thick dark contours, as in the ink and watercolour Man in a Hammock. The subject comes back in oil in L'Homme au hamac of 1913, now cut into facets, with a table of fruit at the left and a book lettered with the name Mercereau below.

Eugène Figuière published the treatise; in The Publisher Eugène Figuière, from 1913, Gleizes set him among books lettered “Du Cubisme” and “Les Peintres cubistes”.

Discharged from the army in the autumn of 1915, he moved to New York with his new wife, Juliette Roche, and painted works drawn from jazz, skyscrapers, electric signs and the Brooklyn Bridge. In Brooklyn Bridge broad black bands arch over and cut across patches of rose, violet, green and ochre.

Sources: Wikipedia, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Musée d'art moderne de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon. Portrait: Pierre Choumoff.