Having learned about drawing through his father’s work designing motifs for the textile industry, Albert Gleizes, nephew of the 1875 Prix de Rome winner Léon Comerre, really learned to paint, teaching himself, when he was about twenty years old. As with many artists of this period, his first paintings betray an Impressionistic influence, in particular that of Pissarro or Sisley, but Gleizes’s admiration for Cézanne and his continued practice of drawing techniques quickly developed his style. Although landscapes remained for a long time his genre of preference, work on forms, volumes and various points of view testifies to care and particular interest. In 1909, Pierre Jean Jouve’s portrait by Henri Le Fauconnier directed him in a decisive way. This painting and Cubism, still barely classified as a unique style for some time after the appearance of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, came to be nourishing sources of power in his work.
In 1912, Gleizes published, along with Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, a work that definitively established the artist as a leading theorist for the movement. During the years which followed, Gleizes settled down in New York and made several journeys to Barcelona, where he collaborated on Picabia’s periodical, 391. During this period, his paintings, which had been characterised by greys and chestnut browns, monochromic and muted tones, began to show experiments with a variety of tints and the light of colours (Study for “Hunting”)
After his return to France at the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s, Gleizes developed works that were gigantic in size and worked projects such as the architectural ornamental paintings for Léonce Rosenberg’s mansion in 1930 and decorations for a show at the Tuileries in 1938.
This tendency to monumentality was accompanied by the evolution of his style that tended more and more towards large formats. Over the years, geometrical representation in his paintings was transformed into mere representational suggestion, ending in the rotations of energetic curves—reminiscent of the concentric disks of Delaunay—that led the artist to the brink of abstraction. Already in 1931, Gleizes had joined the group Abstraction-Création.