ALBERT
GLEIZESParis 1881 -1953 Avignon
Nature morte au Damier, 1924
Still Life with Checker Board
Oil on pasteboard
101 x 76.5 cm.; 39 3/4 x 30 1/8 inches
Signed and dated, lower right: Alb Gleizes 1924
Provenance:
Galerie Suillerot, Paris, 1964
Private collection, Paris
Exhibited:
Oeuvres choisies de 1900 à nos jours, Galerie Max Kaganovitch, Paris, May-June, 1964
Aspects of Art in France & Germany 1900-1970, R. S. Johnson Fine Art, fall 2002: no. 45 and reproduced on page 77 of catalogue.
Reference:
Albert Gleizes, catalogue raisonné, Anne Varichon, Somogy Editions d’art, Paris, 1998: Vol. I, no. 1145, reproduced on page 374.
Notes:
In this major work, Gleizes sums up many of the painterly experiments which he, together with Jacques Villon, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger and others, initiated in 1912. These artists were part of the so-called Puteaux group, Puteaux being the home of the brothers Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and their sisters. Also in 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger published their book on cubism (Du“Cubisme”, Figuière et Cie, publishers, Paris, 1912).
The early, “cubist” experiments of these artists were based on the Section d’Or (The Golden Section), as described in Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura, then newly translated into French. The Golden Section is a triangle whose height is exactly one half of its width. This “perfect” form, seen as a simple triangle, as a pyramid (two Golden Section triangles placed back to back) or a quadrangle (two Golden Section triangles placed one above the other), was used by Gleizes, Villon, Juan Gris, Metzinger and a number of their colleagues as a compositional basis for their paintings in 1912-1919. This “scientific” approach was continued in the 1920s particularly by Gleizes and Villon. Such mathematical calculations are found in this present painting whose composition is based on a Golden Section pyramid. For an extended description of the Golden Section and its use by cubist period artists, see: R. Stanley Johnson Cubism & La Section d’Or, Klees-Gustorf Publishers, 1991. For a more thorough analysis of Gleizes’ ideas around the time of the present painting, see: Albert Gleizes:For and Against the Twentieth Century, Peter Brooke, Yale University Press, 2001: Chapter 8 “Painting and its Laws”, pp. 85-98.