Sergio Cerchi

Paintings by Sergio Cerchi

Born in Florence in 1957, Sergio Cerchi is an Italian painter and musician. Beginning in his teenage years, he started to study in his two passions, the visual arts and music, by attending workshops held by Florence’s artists and playing in musical groups. Cerchi received his Bachelor of Arts from Florence’s Istituto D’Arte of Porta Romana and attended courses at the prestigious Luigi Cherubini Conservatory of Music.

Sergio Cerchi worked through a process of experimentation with various art techniques to develop his own personal style. His influences range from primitive art to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Cerchi’s figurative and still life works are set in flattened and realist tableaux, similar to theater sets, within which are contained references to popular culture, art history and personal experience.

In Cerchi’s paintings, the pictorial surface as a whole is fractured into multiple quadrants whose portion of the image is rendered with different coloring and lighting. Through this technique, figures and objects are segmented and reconstructed in collages composed from their angled fragments. The resulting canvas, with its shifting, peeling surface and fading horizon planes, presents a unique version of cubist art.

Sergio Cerchi’s paintings are mostly executed in different shades of a dominant hue. Depending on the angle of each fragmented quadrant, the tone of that part of the image may appear softer or bolder. The palette of Cerchi’s oil paints range from warm undertones of red carmine, mixed with shades of green, ocher and blues, to tones of brown and gray. A prominent feature of his work is the use of bold, dramatic shading in the compositions.

Since 2011, Sergio Cerchi has been represented by Galleria Gagliardi located in San Gimignano, Siena, Italy. He presented his work at a 2013 curated exhibition, entitled “Art in Therapy”, held at the Chiesa di Sant’Agala, a national archeological site in Spoleto, Italy.

Note: Images of Sergio Cerchi’s work and information on exhibitions can be found through Galleria Gagliardi’s website located at: https://www.galleriagagliardi.com/en/artist-works/cerchi-sergio

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Cerchi, “Supereroe”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Eliot Elisofon

Eliot Elisofon,“Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase”, 1952, Gelatin Silver Print, Image Size 33.5 x 26.8 cm, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Born in New York City in April of 1911 to immigrant parents, Eliot Elisofon, born Meyer Eliot Elicofon, was a photojournalist and a documentary photographer. His humble upbringing and childhood struggles inspired his career as a photographer; the human condition with all its struggles became the central focus of his work.

Elisofon graduated from Fordham University in 1933 and first produced advertising photographs for Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. By 1937, he was regularly contributing work to Life magazine on a variety of subjects, including theater, military exercises, coal miners, and elite society events. In 1936, Elisofon became a founding member of the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers who covered creative and social causes. One of its more active members, he gave lectures, collaborated with sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine on the “Men at Work” project, and taught courses on flash photography and photojournalism.

In 1937, Eliot Elisofon became associated with filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, Beaumont Newhall, the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and Tom Maloney, the editior of U.S. Camera magazine. His first exhibition of his New York street photography was shown at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and New York’s avant-garde Julien Levy Gallery, In 1938, Elisofon’s “Playgrounds of Manhattan” was shown at the New School, a progressive arts college in New York City.

Elisofon was hired in 1939 as a photographer in the Federal Writers’ Project, a WPA New Deal Program, for its series “These Are Our Lives”, which contained thirty-seven life histories of both black and white farm laborers, factory and mill workers, and workers in service occupations or on relief. Beginning in 1942, Elisofon was a war correspondent and a photographer for Life magazine; he was the only photographer to accompany General Patton throughout the North African Campaign. These photographs taken during the campaign became part of the exhibition “The Tunisian Triumph”, which opened in June of 1943 at MOMA and later traveled to twenty cities. Elisofon continued to be associated with Life and other magazines until 1972.

Over the years, Eliot Elisofon traveled to six continents and nineteen books of his work were published during his lifetime. During his photographic journeys around the African continent, Elisofon assembled a collection of African art and took over eighty thousand images; the art and photographs are now part of the collection of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.

Eliot Elisofon’s photograph “Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase” was shot for a ten-page article written by Winthrop Sargeant on Marcel Duchamp, a key member of the Dada movement, for the April 28, 1952, issue of Life magazine. One of Duchamp’s most significant works was his early 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”, a cubist image in the manner of the chronophotography work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was a pioneer in the study of movement and measurement through multiple image photography. Elison’s 1952 time-lapse photograph of Duchamp descending a flight of stairs was done as a tribute to Duchamp’s famous painting; the image above is one of the two staged shots that Elisofon produced in the photo shoot.

Top Insert Image: Eliot Elisofon, “Self Portrait with Speed Graphic Camera, New York City”, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 151.8 x 93.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Imre Szobotka

Imre Szobotka, “Fiatalkori Onarckép (Self Portrait as a Young Man)”, 1912-14, Oil on Canvas, 45.5 x 38.2 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Born in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, in September of 1890, Imre Szobotka was a painter and engraver. Between 1905 and 1910, he studied at Budapest’s School of Design under painter Ignác Újváry. Szobotka traveled to Venice in 1908 for a study trip and traveled to Rome in 1909, this time accompanied by his friend Ervin Bossámyl. He relocated to Paris in 1911, where he lived at the residence of avant-garde sculptor and graphic artist József Csáky, one of the first Parisian sculptors to apply pictorial Cubism to his art.

Szobotka attended the 1911 Independent Salon in Paris, where he viewed the works of the Cubist painters. Inspired by their work and with the encouragement of his friend, the Cubist painter József Csáky, he enrolled at the La Palette School of Art in 1912, where he studied under Cubist painters Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. By the spring of 1913, Szobotka’s works, exhibited in the Independent Salon, were already noticed by the French critics, including writer and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

During World War I, Imre Szobotka was interned as a prisoner of war, starting in 1914 in Bretagne and later, at Saint Brieuc, France, until his release in 1919. The landscapes, still lifes, and portraits made in the internment period were experiments in cubism, symbolism, and orphism, a cubist offshoot that focused on abstraction and bright colors. These works, rare examples of Hungarian Cubism, included his 1914 “Pipe Smoker”, the 1916 “Sailor”, and watercolor illustrations he produced for poet Paul Claude’s “Revelation”.

After his return to Paris in 1919, Szobotka’s paintings contained a more naturalistic expression. He exhibited this new work first in 1921 in Belvedere, a commune in the Vesubie Valley north of Nice, and, between 1929 and 1944, in shows at the Tamás Gallery, the Fränkel Salon, and the Mária Valéria Street gallery. The solid, defined construction of these landscape works by Szobotka insured him a place among the Nagybánya artists, whose work was focused on plain-air painting.

Imre Szobotka was a founding member of Képzőművészek Új Társasága, the New Society of Fine Artists, and presented his work in its exhibitions. For his 1929 “Mill in Nagybánya”, he won the landscape award presented by the Szinyei Society, an artistic association founded after painter and educator Pál Szinyei Merse’s death to promote new artists. Szobotka would later enter the “Mill in Nagybánya” at the 1938 Venice Biennial. In 1941, he won the Szinyei Society’s grand award for his exhibited work.

From 1945 onward, Szobotka produced some graphic work; however, his main concentration was on his landscapes. He spent his last summers in the countryside near the village of Zsemmye where he painted pastoral landscapes. Szobotka became president of the painting division of the Fine and Applied Arts Alliance in 1952. For the body of his work, he received the Munkácsy Award in 1954 and the Socialis Work Order of Merit in 1960. Imre Szobotka died in March of 1961, at the age of seventy, in the city of Budapest.

Imre Szobotka’s “Self Portrait as a Young Man” is one of the key creations of his Parisian years. It shows his embrace of the elements of cubism, particularly the coloring and abstraction of its orphism branch. The main emphasis of the work is not the formal structure with its conventionally postured figure, but rather the way the light breaks its components into prisms of color. Szobotka emphasized his sense of light value and his translucent colorization to form a refined play of reflections, which cut the painting’s solid forms into colored shards.

Insert Images:

Imre Szobotka, “Sailor”, 1916, Oil on Canvas, 35 x 29 cm, Janus Pannonius Museum, Péca

Imre Szobotka, “Gathering Apples”, 1930, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 76 cm, Henman ottó Museum, Miskolc

Imre Sobotka, “Self Portrait”, 1912, Oil on Cardboard, 53 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay, “Manège de Cochons”, 1905-1918, Gouache and Watercolor on Paper, 52.5 x 49.8 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in April of 1885, Robert Victor Félix Delaunay was one of the earliest completely unrepresentational painters, whose work affected the development of abstract art.. In 1902, after finishing his secondary education, he was apprenticed for two years to study decorative arts with a theatrical designer located at the Impasse Ronsin in the Belleville district of Paris, where he worked on theater sets. At the age of nineteen, Delaunay left Ronsin to focus on his painting and entered six of his works at the 1904 Salon des Indépendants

Delaunay traveled to Brittany, where he was influenced by the Pont-Aven group, symbolist artists inspired by the pure color of Paul Gauguin’s works. The works he painted in Brittany he presented at the 22nd Salon des Indépendants. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay became friends with Henri Rousseau and Jean Metzinger, with whom he shared a 1907 exhibition at art dealer Berthe Weill’s gallery. Delaunay, familiar with the color theories of French chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul, started painting at this time in a Neo-Impressionist manner influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne.

After returning to Paris in 1908 from a year in military service, Robert Delaunay began painting multiple series of works in a style that used bold colors and was increasingly influenced by abstraction and cubism. These series included the 1909-1911 “The City”, the “Eiffel Tower” executed 1909-1912, and the 1912-1914 “Window” series. Delaunay started to use pure colors again early in 1912 and, at the end of the year, had painted his first two abstract paintings: the 1913 “Circular Forms” series and “The First Disk” series.

In 1910, Delaunay married textile and theater set designer Sonia Terk who, in 1964, would become the first female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. Together, with Czech painter and graphic artist František Kupka, they pioneered an offshoot of Cubism called Orphism, which today is seen as a key transition from Cubism into Abstract art. Orphism reintroduced the use of strong color during cubism’s monochromatic phase and was known for its geometric shapes.

In 1911, Robert Delaunay began exhibiting in Germany; he was invited by Vasily Kandinsky to participate in the first Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition held at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. Delaunay’s first solo major exhibition in Paris was held in 1912 at fashion designer Paul Poiret’s contemporary Galeries Barbazanges. This show, containing forty-six works from his impressionist period to his cubist Eiffel Tower series, gained him recognition as a monumental visionary artist.

During the period from the outbreak of war in 1914 to 1920, Delaunay and his wife spent the years in Spain and Portugal. In 1917 in Madrid, Delaunay met Russian art patron and ballet impresario Serge Diaghliev and designed the stage set for Diaghilev’s production of “Cleopatra”; Sonia Delaunay produced the designs for the porduction’s costumes. Delaunay would later produced illustrations for Chilean post Vicente Hudobro’s work “Tour Eiffel”. Both Robert and Sonia Delaunay exhibited their work from their time in Portugal at a 1920 show in Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery.

In 1921, Robert Delaunay returned to Paris where he continued to work in both figurative and abstract themes, with an 1922 exhibition of his new work at Galerie Paul Guillaume . He would later be introduced to artists in both surrealism and the Dada movement by poets André Breton and Tristan Tzara. In 1924, Delaunay started his “Runner” series of paintings and, in the next year, executed frescoes for the international Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris.

Delaunay returned to complete abstraction in 1930 and produce compositions with circular disks and color rhythms, sometimes executed in low relief. For the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, he participated in the design of large panels and colored reliefs to be used in the Aeronautics pavilions. Delaunay’s last works were decorations for the sculpture hall of the 1938 Salon des Tuileries, an annual painting and sculpture exhibition.

Stricken with cancer, Robert Delaunay lost mobility and his health gradually deteriorated. He died from cancer on October 25, 1941 in Montpellier, at the age of fifty-six. In 1952, Delaunay was reburied in Gambais, a commune in north-central France.

Roger de La Fresnaye

Roger de La Fresnaye, “Artillery”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 159 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Born in Le Mans, France, in July of 1885, Roger de La Fresnaye was a French painter who combined melodic colors with the geometric simplified forms of Cubism. He studied at several art schools in Paris, including the Ranson Academy, under painter Paul Ranson, and the École des Beaux-Arts. La Fresnaye, in his early works, experimented both with Symbolism, with its colorful shapes and dream=like quality, and also with Expressionism, which feature bold colors and swirling brushstrokes.

Around 1910, Roger de La Fresnaye began incorporating the more abstract style of Cubism into his work. In 1912, he became a member of the Section d”Or, a group of artists and dealers aimed at spreading the influence of the new art form of Cubism. Although La Fresnaye adopted the geometric emphasis of Cubism, he emphasized the use of color and retained some recognizable forms in his work. This was largely due to Robert Delaunay’s abstract style called Orphism, which its interplay of shapes, colors, and use of light.

Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited his works at the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or, one of the more important shows of its time which featured more than two hundred Cubist works. He entered the French Army during World War One and was discharged in 1918 due to his contracting tuberculosis. La Frewnaye went to the south of France to recover, continuing to draw and paint in watercolor. However, he never recovered enough energy to undertake a sustained work load.

Although his paintings did much to popularize Cubism, Roger de La Fresnaye later abandoned the avant-garde and become one of France’s advocates of traditional realism. He ceased painting in 1922 but continued to produce drawings. La Fresnaye’s death occurred in Grasse on the French Riviera in November of 1925 at the age of forty.

Roger de La Fresnaye’s 1911 “Artillery”was painted three years before the outbreak of World War One. It depicts officers on horseback accompanying a caisson, or ammunition wagon, transporting a field gun and three soldiers in helmets. A military band wearing the blue and red colors of the French infantry is in the background. La Fresnaye’s geometric rendering of the forms strengthens the composition, evoking the military group’s cadenced movement through the canvas’s space.

Top Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Nature Morte à l’Oeuf”, 1910, Oil on Board on Panel, 66.2 x 50.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, Le Malade Assis dans son Lit, 1922, Gouache and Graphite on Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Alice au Grand Chapeau”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130.5 x 97 cm, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson, “New Continent”, 1962, Painted Wood, 197.5 x 309.2 x 25.7 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum

Louise Nevelson, “Big Black”, 1962, Painted Wood, 274.9 x 319.5 x 30.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Louise Nevelson’s artwork began as tabletop collages of found wood, then grew through wall sculptures before metamorphosing into complete environments. She began her work with the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. After leaving the WPA, Nevelson incorporated European cubism and surrealism into her work. This, combined with her personal vision and experience, earned her a prominent position in America’s avant-garde art world of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born Leah Berliawsky in Pereyaslav, fifty miles southeast of Kiev in 1899, Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Her family emigrated to Rockland, Maine in 1905. Isolated in her early years from the other two dozen Jewish families in the town, Nevelson excelled in her high school’s art courses and wanted to attend, upon her graduation in 1918, the Pratt Institute in New York. Her plans changed with her marriage to wealthy businessman Charles Nevelson; the couple moved to 300 Central Park West in New York City.

After giving birth to her only son Myron Irving in 1922, Nevelson embarked on an increasingly bohemian lifestyle, in which she explored Eastern religious movements and spiritualism. She began art classes under painter and printmaker Kenneth Hayes Miller and master of drawing and educator Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League. Nevelson also worked in theater under the tutelage of stage and screen actress Norina Matchabelli, who acted under the stage name of Maria Carmi. In 1924, the Nevelson family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, a move which parted Louise Nevelson from her city life and its artistic environment. Not willing to be just a socialite wife, she separated from her husband during the winter of 1932 and later divorced him in 1941.

In 1931 Louise Nevelson sent her son to live with family and traveled to Europe. Staying in Munich, she studied with painter Hans Hofmann, who became a pioneer in abstract expressionism. There Nevelson found the element of cubism that would become her guiding light: the structuring of abstract compositional elements within a geometric grid that brought order to seeming chaos. Upon her return to America, she moved into her own house on East 30th Street in Manhattan and in 1935 had her first exhibition, a collection of small semi-abstract figures modeled in clay. Nevelson convinced gallery owner Karl Nierendorf in 1941 to act as her representative which resulted in four solo exhibitions of her work at his gallery.

In the 1940s, Nevelson began producing Cubist figure studies in stone, bronze, terra cotta, and wood. Influenced by the monumental totemic sculptures she encountered on Mayan culture trips to Mexico, Nevelson began to work on a larger scale in her own work, creating sculptures that encompassed the viewer. Her work began to be acquired by institutions in New York City such as the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1958, Nevelson joine the Martha Jackson Gallery, where she was guaranteed income and became financially secure. That year, she was photographed and featured on the cover of Life magazine.

Louise Nevelson had her first solo-woman show in Europe in 1960 at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. In the 1960s she designed works for the Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan. For her 1962 work “New Continent”, Louise Nevelson assembled found architectural elements such as chair legs, balusters, and moldings within the thirty-six wooden compartments of her work and then painted the construction white. She juxtaposed the geometric grid of the boxes with a lyrical arrangement of curves, textures, light, and shadow. The urban environment of Manhattan provided the artist with the discarded objects that were the building blocks of her sculptural practice.

In the 1970s, Nevelson began to work with the medium of Cor-Ten steel, a durable metal that rusts on the exterior but retains its internal integrity. She designed numerous monumental outdoor works, including the 1963 Cor-Ten steel “Atmosphere and Environment X”. In 1973, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis curated a major exhibition of Nevelson’s work which traveled the country for two years. In 1978, a small plot in lower Manhattan was renamed Louise Nevelson Square in her honor; seven tree-shaped monumental steel pieces were installed there by the artist.

Louise Nevelson died on April 17, 1988, at her home in New York City. In 1994, the Nevelson-Berliawsky Gallery of 20th Century Art opened at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Nevelson’s hometown of Rockland, Maine.

Second Insert Image: Louise Nevelson, “East Landscape”, circa 1955, Aquatint and Etching with hand-Coloring in Watercolor, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Louise Nevelson, “Dircus Wagon”, Aquatint and Etching with Hand-Coloring in Watercolor, circa 1955, Private Collection

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “Man on a Balcony”, Oil on Canvas, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art

“Man on a Balcony” is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d’Automne of 1912. This Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such ‘barbaric art’.

Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrated the principles of the movement in this monumental six foot tall painting with its projecting planes and fragmented lines. The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes’s ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences. The painting was completed around the same time as Albert Gleizes co-authored with Jean Metzinger a major treatise and manifesto on cubism entitled “Du Cubisme”.

“The plastic results are determined by the technique. As we can see straightaway, it is not a matter of describing, nor is it a matter of abstracting from, anything that is external to itself. There is a concrete act that has to be realised, a reality to be produced – of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognise in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest.”- Albert Gleizes, The Epic: From Immobile to mobile Form”, 1925

Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, “Gelmeroda XIII”, Oil on Canvas, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States.

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012.

Feininger’s 1936 “Gelmeroda XIII” portrays one of his favorite subjects—the Gothic church of Gelmeroda, located near Weimar, Germany. In his many images of the fourteenth-century structure, Feininger explored the building as a physical connector between the past and the present. Here, he adopts the angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism and Italian Futurism to give a sense of spiritual energy and transcendence. In 1937, one year after this work was completed, Nazi officials included Feininger’s art in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, prompting him to return permanently to the United States.

Henri Le Fauconnier

Henri Le Fauconnier, “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours”, (Mountaineers Attacked by Bears), Oil on Canvas, 1912, Rhode Island School of Design Museum

Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier was a French Cubist painter born in Hesdin. Le Fauconnier was seen as one of the leading figures among the Montparnasse Cubists. At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants Le Fauconnier and colleagues Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay caused a scandal with their Cubist paintings.

He was in contacts with many European avant-garde artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, writing a theoretical text for the catalogue of the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich, of which he became a member. Le Fauconnier exhibited his vast “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours” at the Salon d’Automne of 1912 in Paris.

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “L’Homme au Balcon”, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), 1912, Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. In 1912 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du “Cubisme”. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d’Or group of artists.

He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.

Juan Gris

Juan Gris, “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth”, Oil on Canvas, 1915, Private Collection

Juan Gris was born in Madrid. He later studied engineering at Madrid’s School of Arts and Sciences. There, from 1902 to 1904, he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Moreno Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José Victoriano González adopted the more distinctive name Juan Gris.

In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. He submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L’assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris.

Gris began to paint seriously in 1910 (when he gave up working as a satirical cartoonist), developing at this time a personal Cubist style. In A Life of Picasso, John Richardson writes that Jean Metzinger’s 1911 work, Le goûter (Tea Time), persuaded Juan Gris of the importance of mathematics in painting. Gris exhibited for the first time at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants (a painting entitled Hommage à Pablo Picasso).

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia, “La Source (The Spring)”, 1912

Francis Picabia, born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia), was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. Picabia was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.

Jean Metzinger

Oil Paintings by Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), was a French artist, painter, theorist, writer and poet. His early works, from 1902 to 1904, were influenced by the Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauve styles.

From 1908 Metzinger was directly involved with Cubism; both as a leading artist and principle theorist. Metzinger, following Picasso and Braque, was chronologically the third Cubist painter. He was a founding member of the Section d’Or group of artists, and together with Albert Gleizes, wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912.