Focus on Brooklyn Bridge (Gleizes) and discuss the Description.
Brooklyn Bridge is an oil and gouache painting on canvas with dimensions 102 x 102 cm (40 1/8 x 40 1/8 inches) inscribed "Brooklyn Bridge, Alb. Gleizes, 15, lower right.
In a celebration of this feat of modernity, the architecture of the Brooklyn Bridge served as the inspiration for a series of works by Gleizes. In this first painting of the series, juxtaposed arabesques and distinctive diagonals interconnect dynamically, suggesting the bridge's complex architectonic engineering.As in earlier works by Gleizes, this canvas is directly engaged with the environment. While highly abstract, Brooklyn Bridge maintains an evident visual basis. From 1914 to the end of the 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.In Du "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger wrote: "...let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be banished—in any event, not yet. An art cannot be raised to the level of pure effusion at the first step."Three years later, the transformation toward pure effusion would manifest itself in the Brooklyn Bridge and continue further still in subsequent works produced by the artist in New York. The features of the bridge are described by forceful rhythms and colors, even though the actual bridge itself has disappeared; superseded by a synthesis of Gleizes's plastic equivalents of physical reality. The three Brooklyn Bridge paintings are a prime example of Gleizes's experimentation with the plastic translation of one of his most treasured themes: the city which draws life from the river.Already, in his 1913 publication The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations, Guillaume Apollinaire drew parallels between the work of Gleizes and the realization of metal constructions such as bridges:Majesty: this is what, above all, characterizes the art of Albert Gleizes. He thus brings a startling innovation to contemporary art. Something that before him was found in but few of the modern painters.This majesty arouses and provokes the imagination; considered from the plastic point of view, it is the immensity of things.This art is vigorous. The pictures of Albert Gleizes are realized by a force of the same sort as that which realized the Pyramids and the Cathedrals, the constructions in metal, the bridges and the tunnels. (Apollinaire, 1913)
New York Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes abstract Cubism Du "Cubisme" The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations Brooklyn Bridge