Albert Gleizes, Seated Woman, 1919

Albert Gleizes was deeply involved with most of the major groups and events that revolutionized painting in Europe between the two wars. His work hung in Room VIII of the 1910 Salon d’Automne along with the works of Metzinger, Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Léger, Roger de la Fresnaye, Henri Le Fauconnier and Francis Picabia. Several months later he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendents in Room 41 with Delaunay, Léger and Metzinger. In 1912, he and Metzinger wrote and published Du cubisme, an aesthetic handbook on cubism. He was part of the group of artists who gathered frequently at the home of the brothers Duchamp to discuss the concepts that Denis and Sérusier had laid forth. Their investigations considered the notion of numbers and proportions as the sole basis for painting; their ideological foundations lay in fauvism and cubism. Gleizes participated in the Armory Show in New York City and in the Section d’Or exhibitions and periodical. He later founded the magazine 391 in Barcelona and in the early 30’s was a member of Abstract-Création, a group of artists, including Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Kandinsky, Arp, Albers and Schwitters among others, who explored the importance of pure, abstract form in painting and sculpture.

Seated Woman was painted at an important moment in Gleizes’s career. He had spent the summer of 1918 in Pelham, New York and there had realized his intense dissatisfaction with the hermetic, unintelligible place that art held in society. His repulsion led him to an interest in religion and to aim for absolute order in his work. He sought to eliminate the textural and surface variations and the sensual paint of his previous work. He disclaimed the schism between easel painting and decoration as a reflection of a rigid, pretentious class society. His interest lay in the relationships among forms and shapes.

His rich painterly handling is still evident in Seated Woman. His desire for the entire field to be used equally (already apparent in his works of the mid- to late teens) is achieved here in the rich allover decoration – dots, dashes, stripes, corner outlines. Gleizes simplified and distorted forms rather than splintering them apart and always made rich, colorful works. Daniel Robbins characterizes Gleizes as “one of the few painters to come out of Cubism with a wholly individual style, undeflected by later artistic movements,” (Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964, p. 25).