Artists

Albert Leon Gleizes

French, 1881-1953

This French painter and writer born Albert Leon Gleizes was raised in Paris and was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. After finishing secondary school, he worked with his father and then while serving in the army from 1902 to 1905 he began to paint seriously. Initially influenced by the Impressionists, at twenty-one his work La Seine a Asnieres was exhibited at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902.

With several friends in 1906 he founded the Abbaye de Creteil outside Paris. This commune of artists and writers scorned bourgeois society and sought to create nonallegorical, epic art based on modern themes. The commune closed in 1908 due to financial restraints and in 1909 he came under the influence of Fernand Leger, Robert Delauney, Jean Metzinger and later to Henri Faucconnier who led Gleizes to his cubist style. In 1910 he exhibited at the Salon des Independents, Paris and the Jack of Diamonds in Moscow.

In 1914 Gleizes re-entered the military service. His paintings had become abstract by 1915. Galeries Daimau, Barcelona held his first one man show in 1916.  Then beginning 1918 while in America, Gleizes developed an interest in spiritual values and as a result the theme of religious thought entered many of his subsequent writings. He founded Moly-Sabata, another utopian community of artists and craftsmen in Sablons.  Later in his career he was commissioned  for murals for the Paris Worlds Fair of 1937.  In 1947, a major Gleizes retrospective occurred in Lyons at the Chapelle du Lycee Ampere.  From 1949 to 1950 Gleizes painted illustrations for Pascal's Pensees and in 1952 he painted a fresco, Eucharist, for the chapel Les Fontaines at Chantilly. Gleizes died in Avignon on June 23, 1953.