How does Portrait de l'éditeur Eugène Figuière elucidate its Description?
Portrait of Eugène Figuière is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 143.5 by l01.5 cm (56.5 x 40 inches) signed and dated "Alb Gleizes 13", lower right. Studies for this work likely began during the spring or summer of 1913 while the full portrait was completed during the late summer or early fall of 1913. The work represents Eugène Figuière who is closely associated with Gleizes' friends from the Abbaye de Créteil, Jacques Nayral and Alexandre Mercereau.Eugène Figuière, head of his own publishing company, strove to be identified with every modern development. In this portrait which Salmon admired for its "fine and most adroit psychology", he is surrounded by his publications which were written by Gleizes' friends: Alexandre Mercereau, Georges Polti, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Metzinger, Paul Fort, Gustave Kahn, Henri-Martin Barzun and Jacques Nayral.In this picture Gleizes merges the sitter with the environment, blurring the distinction between background and foreground. In addition to the simultaneous views and multiple perspective, the artist has included the image of a clock in the upper left quadrant (as in Metzinger's Nu à la cheminée, Nude of 1910), a fact that reveals Gleizes' didactic visual and literary reference to the mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré, and to the philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of 'duration'.Outlining his practice at the time, in an essay published in February 1913 in Montjoie! Gleizes writes:It is sufficient for me to say, quickly, that painters today only consider the object in relation to the totality of things and, with regard to itself, in relation to the totality of its aspects. As they are not unaware of the fact that a form which is more pronounced dominates those which are less pronounced, the plastic dynamism will be born from the rhythmic relations of objects to objects, as with the different aspects of one and the same object, juxtaposed—not superposed, as some would like to believe—with all the sensibility and taste of the painter for whom those are the only rules. (Gleizes, 1913)
Abbaye de Créteil Alexandre Mercereau Georges Polti Guillaume Apollinaire Gustave Kahn Henri Bergson Henri Poincaré Jean Metzinger