Focus on this artwork and analyze the Cubism.
Paysage à Meudon, Gleizes' largest painting to date, is the principal product of "rodage" (French: rodage, a 'grinding together', a term Gleizes himself used with Jean Metzinger}. In his Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, art historian David Cottington writes of Paysage à Meudon:The classical armature and Claudian image of Gleizes' picture are both overlaid with a pattern of planes and facets that fragments forms, combines perspectives and complicates the relation between spaces and volumes, but does little to disrupt the conventional spatial recession.
Just as in the works of Metzinger, and unlike those of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque of the same period, Gleizes had no interest in the flattening of the entire surface, of fusing background and foreground to the point where all spatial depth of field was abandoned. Gleizes made use of fragmentation of form, multiple perspective views (i.e., mobile and dynamic, rather than static and from one point-of-view) along with linear and planar structural qualities. Gleizes' Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) of the following year employs the same concept of multiple perspective, but not at the expense of vacating spatial depth. Though highly sophisticated in theory, this aspect of simultaneity would actually become quite commonly employed within the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deployed these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner", according to Cottington.
In his catalogue preface for the 1911 Indépendants de Bruxelles, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of this painting, titled Le chemin:Il est sorti un art simple et noble, expressif et mesuré, ardent à la recherche de la beauté et tout prêt à aborder ces vastes sujets que les peintre d'hier n'osaient entreprendre.
Gleizes' Proto-Cubist work entitled L'Arbre (The Tree) exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants in Paris was the point of departure for Paysage à Meudon. Visibly distant from the work of Picasso or Braque, Paysage à Meudon is stylistically much closer to Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay. Gleizes' interpretation of space in a succession of plans and simple geometric lines descends directly from the teachings of Paul Cézanne. These same aesthetic preoccupations would unite several artists that formed a group and held meetings in Puteaux, at the Duchamp residence. For their first public manifestation as a group—the Salon de la Section d'Or of 1912—Gleizes chose to present this 1911 landscape (no. 39 of the catalogue), along with Les Baigneuses and the monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing), both of 1912.
In their Lot Notes for the 1999 sale, Christie's writes:In 1911, Albert Gleizes was at the height of his artistic powers and Paysage à Meudon is one of the artist's most celebrated paintings. [...] In the present work, Gleizes retained a traditional sense of perspective and employed the use of a vanishing point in the road and the houses in the background. There is a logical diminution of form, and in this respect Gleizes' Cubism retained his singular vision of imposing a sense of weight and volumetric relationships to his subjects.
In their Lot Notes for the 2010 sale, Christie's writes:Le Chemin (Meudon) is a large and important painting made by Albert Gleizes in the summer of 1911 at the height of his new friendship and collaboration with fellow Cubist Jean Metzinger. One of his largest and most ambitious paintings from this period, made in direct response to the inspiration of Metzinger, it was exhibited by Gleizes at the groundbreaking exhibition of the so-called 'Salon Cubists', Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Gleizes, at the Salon des Indépendants in June 1911.With its prismatic Cubism, shifting multiple perspective points and its holistic integration of landscape and figure centred around this lone figures journey through a path in the woods and through the heart of the picture, this work represents a radical extension of Gleizes' Cubism into an entirely new integrated and simultaneous style of composition.
Georges Braque Meudon Christie's Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes Paul Cézanne Cubism simultaneity Harvest Threshing Pablo Picasso Proto-Cubist L'Arbre Robert Delaunay Jean Metzinger Section d'Or Fernand Léger Henri Le Fauconnier Picasso Les Baigneuses Salon des Indépendants Braque