ALBERT GLEIZES

Art Brokerage: Albert Gleizes (8 December 1881, Paris 23 June 1953), was a French painter. Born Albert L�on Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. Gleizes was also the nephew of L�on Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery. Finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the French army then began pursuing a career as a painter, primarily doing landscapes. Initially influenced by the Impressionists, he was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine � Asni�res was exhibited at the Soci�t� Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year he was part of the first Salon d'Automne and soon came under the influence of Fernand L�ger, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1907 Gleizes and some of his friends pursued the idea of creating the Abbaye de Cr�teil, a self-supporting community of artists which would allow them to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, at a large house in Cr�teil, Gleizes along with other painters, poets, musicians and writers, gathered to create. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Cr�teil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved temporarily into La Ruche, the artist commune in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. Gleizes' evolving cubism saw him exhibit at the Salon des Ind�pendants in Paris in 1910 then collaborate with Jean Metzinger to produce a theoretical essay about cubism that was published in 1912. In the fall of that year, he and Metzinger joined the Puteaux Group led by Jacques Villon and his brother Marcel Duchamp. In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of painting to an American audience at the Armory Show in New York City.