Gleizes, Albert

Gleizes, Albert (1881–1953). French painter, graphic artist, and writer, born in Paris. After leaving school he worked in his father's design studio and he began to paint seriously whilst serving in the army, 1901–5. In 1906, with several friends, he founded the Abbaye de Créteil, near Paris, a utopian community of artists and writers, but in 1908 it closed because of financial difficulties. Gleizes's early work had been Impressionist in style, but in 1909 he took up Cubism, and in 1912 he wrote with Metzinger the book Du Cubisme (an English translation, Cubism, appeared in 1913 and in 1947 the authors produced a revised deluxe edition of the French text, illustrated with original prints). This was the first book on the movement and it remains Gleizes's main claim to fame. In 1912 he was among the founders of the Section d'Or group and in 1913 he exhibited at the Armory Show, New York. After serving again in the French army, 1914–15, Gleizes lived from 1915 to 1917 in New York, where he underwent a religious conversion. Much of his later career was devoted to trying to achieve a synthesis of medieval and modern art, expressing Christian ideas through pseudo-Cubist forms. In this he is generally reckoned to have been conspicuously unsuccessful and his modest reputation as a painter rests on his pre-war work. In 1927 he founded another utopian community—Moly-Sabata at Sablons—and in the 1930s he painted several murals, taking as his ideal the close relationship between architecture, sculpture, and painting in the Middle Ages. He expounded his views in several books and pamphlets, including La Peinture et ses lois (1924).