Focus on L'Arbre and discuss the 1910 in brief.
Gleizes writes in his Souvenirs of the crucial year 1910:After painting a series of pictures, some of which are still in existence today, I was still dissatisfied and yet better prepared for experiments that would go deeper. It was in 1910 that, for the first time, I showed in the Salon des Indépendants and completely abandoned the salon of the Nationale, where there was nothing more for me to do. I sent to the Cours-la-Reine a full figure, a full sized portrait of the poet René Arcos, as well as two landscapes of the area round Paris, simple collections of masses in restrained colours. From that moment onwards, I can see it clearly now, my researches passed from the surface to the interior of the plastic problem. So 1910 brought another white stone to my life, as it would mark a stage which, if it was not conclusive, would at least be very positive. Above all in the second half of that year, when I painted the canvasses which would appear in the Salon des Indépendants of 1911.
Gleizes met Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay in 1910, through Alexandre Mercereau, but had only vague knowledge of the work they showed at the Salon des Indépendants that same year. Gleizes too had exhibited at the same salon. Most importantly, Gleizes had read an article which had struck him, written by Jean Metzinger for the young literary review, Pan, run by two young poets, [Marcel Rieu] and Jean Clary. The anti-Hellenic concept of representing a subject from multiple points of view was a central idea of Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture article of 1910. It was at the Indépendants of 1910 that Metzinger showed a portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire which Apollinaire in his book The Cubist Painters, 1913, claimed was the first Cubist portrait. Gleizes continues writing in his Souvenirs:1910 was the year in which, in its last months, a more or less coherent group began to form from certain tendencies which were quite clearly present in our generation but had previously been scattered. Painters saw what they had in common, poets joined them, feelings of sympathy were established, a general atmosphere began to form which would soon produce an action whose effects were to be quickly felt in the surrounding world. Painters and writers would support each other, moved as they all were by a single faith. (Albert Gleizes, Souvenirs)
Albert Gleizes Alexandre Mercereau Guillaume Apollinaire Jean Metzinger Robert Delaunay Salon des Indépendants