How does Portrait of an Army Doctor elucidate its Description?
Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 119.8 cm × 95.1 cm (47.2 in × 37.4 in) inscribed Alb. Gleizes, Toul 1914, lower right. An early photograph of the work shows the inscribed date as 1914–15.Gleizes's works from this period, just as those of the early 1920s, are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern." Gleizes brings into practice an effect reminiscent of Divisionist theory via the incorporation of colored squares within three sections of the canvas, one of which is composed of alternating pigments of contrasting blues and reds. The use of blue, white and red in the overall composition recall the colors of the French flag. Such a display of patriotism was not uncommon among the Cubists, even leading up to the war. French flags can be seen in the works of Roger de La Fresnaye; Fourteenth of July, 1913–14 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX), and The Conquest of the Air, 1913 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Cubo-Futurist Gino Severini, too, included the French flag in his 1913 painting Train of the Wounded, 1913. While not depicting the flag itself, wartime works by Jean Metzinger dominantly exhibit blues and reds, along with army green, in such works as Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess), 1914–15, Smart Museum of Art, and Femme au miroir (Lady at her Dressing Table), April 1916.In 1915 Gleizes published an article in Jean Cocteau's patriotic review, Le Mot in which he attacks critics who accuse the new tendencies in art of being unpatriotic. The final issue of Le Mot includes a sketch by Gleizes based on wounded soldiers returning from a battle at Bois le Prêtre.Despite its descriptive title, the subject matter of Portrait of an Army Doctor has practically disappeared. The canvas is no longer analyzed or structured geometrically according to the golden ratio, though the armrest of the chair is treated as the beginning of a Fibonacci spiral. The masses of the composition are arranged in quasi-equilibrium. The center of the sitter face is the superior vertex of a triangular construct that extends toward the outer edges of the canvas.The intersection of the two arcs that compose the shoulders is centered on the vertical axis. The source of light is undetermined, or omnidirectional, just as the vantage point of the artist, in accord with the Cubist principle of 'simultaneity' (or multiple perspective): "a succession of descriptive aspects of the external world... by giving a multiple series of appearances, each one seen in its own perspective", writes Gleizes, "a succession of descriptive states. Waking up, this eye lurched from one point of view to the other, jumped back again, and was again thrown into a state of excitement." Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself".
Multiple perspective was in itself a protest against painting defined as an art based on space, that is to say, static. An aspiration towards mobility begins to appear and to appeal to the eye. The eye is required to enter into that collaboration which is necessary if it wishes to emerge from the torpor to which it had been reduced at the insistence of the single point perspective of the Renaissance; painting makes a legitimate claim to be regarded as an art of time ... Breaking up the plane into surfaces of different sizes reduced to geometrical forms. Sometimes certain indications of figures appear in this assemblage, obtained with the help of a few lines and several suggestive points. (Gleizes, 1927)
While depth perception and perspective have been subdued to a large extent, the primary structural lines appear to recede or converge toward a multitude of vanishing points located at infinity. Though, unlike those of classical perspective, these vanishing points are not placed on a given horizon (a theoretical line that represents the eye level of the observer), nor do they allow the viewer to reconstruct the relative distance of parts or features of an object. Rather, they are placed on various horizons. The viewer is observing a non-linear scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's multiple axes, giving the appearance of different forms of calculated perspective.
Surfaces appear to overlap creating a sense of occlusion, but the resulting information is insufficient to allow the observer to recreate depth of field. By removing these optical cues, the geometrical method of perspective used to create the illusion of form, space and depth since the Renaissance, the artifice of an illusionistic trickery as Metzinger called it, Gleizes's aim was to arrive at what he perceived as 'truth', the constructive essence of the physical world.
So, now that we are in possession of the means (and I firmly believe that we are) we must pitilessly reject the image of the Renaissance that is addressed exclusively to the senses, but, at the same time, we should not fear, should the occasion present itself, an image determined by geometry, by the square, the right angle, because it, in its nature, corresponds to the higher stages. The Renaissance image, I repeat, bears no, or too little, relation to them; the new image will give more meaning and variety to the space. (Gleizes)
We are in the age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, actions, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallised the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilized in his picture. The painting of today must crystallise a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system..." (Gleizes, c.1916, letter addressed to Henri-Martin Barzun)
From 1914 to the end of Gleizes's New York period—however nonrepresentational—works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism. Gleizes's nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."
vanishing point in New York French flag depth perception Gino Severini golden ratio Roger de La Fresnaye Fibonacci spiral Femme au miroir (Lady at her Dressing Table) abstract x Cubism occlusion Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess) Smart Museum of Art Soldier at a Game of Chess Henri-Martin Barzun Jean Cocteau Lady at her Dressing Table Jean Metzinger Divisionist cm Toul Femme au miroir