Focus on Brooklyn Bridge (Gleizes) and analyze the Abstraction.
Gleizes' Brooklyn Bridge (his first painting of the bridge) was the most abstract image made of the bridge to date. His second version, also of 1915, measuring 148.1 x 120.4 cm (58¼ x 47 3/8in.), is entirely abstract. His third and last oil painting of the series, dated 1917 and entitled On Brooklyn Bridge (Sur Brooklyn Bridge), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, measures 161.8 x 129.5 cm (63 3/4 x 51 in.). This composition relates most closely with a 1915 drawing (25 x 19 cm). It is an attempt to synthesize New York City under the symbol of the bridge through a collection of unifying circles, spheres and arcs. In the composition Gleizes portrays both ends of the bridge with the East River below. The Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn appear in the distance. This 1917 canvas—the least abstract of the three—more so than the other paintings of the series, resembles Stella's 1919-20 painting.Non-objective painting rarely has to do with realistic qualities and yet it is still bound to the logic of painting as representational of the subject matter. In Andréi Nakov's study, Abstract/Concrete - Russian and Polish Non-objective Art, non-representation itself becomes the impetus for depicting a subject. In his last book, Painting and on Man become Painter, written in 1948, Gleizes warns against the trend of non-representation becoming an end unto itself, insisting on the importance, instead, of esemplastic qualities. For Gleizes, the latter prevails over the concepts of representational or abstract qualities of the painting.Toward the end of 1913 Gleizes defended the need for a representational subject matter in 'Opinion' published by Ricciotto Canudo in Monjoie!, but it was for reasons that were entirely plastic and non-representational at the same time:We are agreed that anecdote counts for nothing in a painted work. It is a pretext, so be it, but a pretext which we should not reject. Through a certain coefficient of imitation we will verify the legitimacy of the things we have discovered, the picture will not be reduced to the merely pleasurable arabesque of an oriental carpet, and we will obtain an infinite variety which would otherwise be impossible. (Gleizes, 1913)
In The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form, Gleizes writes:As we can see straightaway, it is not a matter of describing, nor is it a matter of abstracting from, anything that is external to itself. There is a concrete act that has to be realized, a reality to be produced - of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognize in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest. Like any natural, physical reality, painting, understood in this way, will touch anyone who knows how to enter into it, not through their opinions on something that exists independently of it, but through its own existence, through those inter-relations, constantly in movement, which enable us to transmit life itself. (Gleizes, 1928)
New York abstract Solomon R. Guggenheim East River New York City Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum esemplastic Ricciotto Canudo Brooklyn Bridge Andréi Nakov