Focus on this artwork and explore the Description.
La Chasse is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 123.2 by 99 cm (48.5 x 39 inches) signed "Albert Gleizes", lower right. Painted in 1911.In this outdoor hunting scene the horizon line is almost on top of the canvas. Seven people are present, along with numerous animals. A man with a hunting horn (Cor de chasse, la trompe du piqueur) can be seen in the foreground, his back turned to the viewer, with a group of hunting dogs to his right. Men on horses prepare for departure. Tension is in the air as the hunters and animals interact with one another. Another hunter on foot holds a gun in the background with a woman and child nearby and a village beyond. Spatial depth is minimized, the overall composition flattened, yet distances to the viewer are determined by the relationship of size; the further the object, the smaller in appearance. The faceting however does not partake in the size-distance relation, as one would expect. The hunting dogs to the lower right, for example, are treated with similar sized 'cubes' as the elements in the upper portions of the canvas; corresponding to the background. The hunting horn in the foreground is almost identical in size and in faceting to the trees in the distance. The same rounded shapes espouse the spherical surfaces formed by the horses heads. This serves to counter the illusion of depth; each portion of the canvas equally important in the overall composition.With its epic subject matter—far removed from neutral themes of the fruit dish, violin, and seated nudes exhibited by Picasso and Braque in the private boutique of Kahnweiler—The Hunt was destined form its very inception to be exhibited at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées; a huge public venue where several thousand viewers would see the works exhibited. Gleizes rarely painted still lifes, his epic interests usually finding sympathetic echos in more inclusive themes, such as La Chasse (The Hunt) and the monumental Harvest Threshing (Le Dépiquage des Moissons) of 1912. He wished to create a heroic art, stripped of ornament and obscure allegory, an art dealing on the one hand with relevant subjects of modern life: crowds, man and machines, and ultimately, the city itself (based on observations of the real world). And on the other, he wished to project tradition and accumulated cultural thought (based on memory).Gleizes continually stressed subjects of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning. He regarded the painting as a manifold where subjective consciousness and the objective nature of the physical world could not only coincide but also be resolved.
Here Gleizes not only created a synthetic landscape, in which elements are placed in unreal but symbolic relationships to each other, but also created a synthesis of social experience, showing two distinct types of human use of the land. Le Fauconnier painted a similar subject [Le Chasseur] the following year. Dorival has suggested that the treatment of the horses may well be an important source for those of Duchamp-Villon in 1914. [...] In his [1916] attempt to organize in plastic terms the abstract equivalent of his earlier broad panoramas, Gleizes reverted to the tilting planes reminiscent of smaller ones in such volumetric cubist works as The Hunt and Jacques Nayral, both of 1911. (Daniel Robbins, Guggenheim, 1964)
Albert Gleizes Harvest Threshing Salon d'Automne