How does Bords de la Marne elucidate its Structural rhythms?
Between 1905 and 1908, Gleizes transited through Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism with a brief passage though Fauvism. By 1909 he began simplifying both his color and form. These paintings were parallel to the written and verbal ideas propounded at the Abbaye de Créteil.
Experienced in the treatment of inclusive landscapes (writes Robbins), he nevertheless had to solve the problem of balancing many simultaneous visions on a painted surface. Gleizes mitigated the distortion of distance by linear perspective, by flattening the picture plane; his skies were on the same plane as the simple flat objects in front and, although scale was retained, a form in the distance would be brought to the foreground by making it bright. Every element of the painting had to be reduced to clear planes, treated as uniformly as possible...
According to Gleizes, Mercereau introduced him to Jean Metzinger in 1910; the year Mercereau organized the Jack of Diamonds Exhibition in Moscow. Before Gleizes and Metzinger had met, they were both single out by Louis Vauxcelles, who wrote disparaging comments about their "cubes Blafards" possibly regarding Metzinger's Portrait of Apollinaire and Gleizes' L'Arbre (The Tree) (1910), both exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants.Before 1911 a group of artists formed through the Mercereau connection, including Allard, Barzun, Beauduin, Castiaux, Jouve, Divoire, Parmentier, Marinetti, Brâncuși, Varlet, Apollinaire and Salmon.In his preface to the 1911 Brussels Indépendants, Apollinaire wrote: ...thus has come a simple and noble art, expressive and measured, eager to discover beauty, and entirely ready to tackle those vast subjects which the painters of yesterday did not dare to undertake, abandoning them to the presumptuous, old-fashioned and boring daubers of the official Salons.
Unlike the style and subject matter of Picasso and Braque, the paintings of Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and others of the Mercereau group favored vast scenes (epic themes) representing modern life.Allard wrote of Gleizes, Le Fauconnier and Metzinger, in a review of the 1910 Salon d'Automne:Thus is born at the antipodes of impressionism an art which cares little to imitate the occasional cosmic episode, but which offers to the intelligence of the spectator the essential elements of a synthesis in time, in all its pictorial fullness.
Abbaye de Créteil Albert Gleizes Fauvism Fernand Léger Impressionism Jean Metzinger L'Arbre Louis Vauxcelles Neo-Impressionism Robert Delaunay