The Bathers

Description

Les Baigneuses is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 105 x 171 cm (41.3 by 67.3 inches), signed Albert Gleizes and dated 1912, lower left. This work, painted at the outset of 1912, represents a series of naked elegant women at various points in the landscape foreground, their reflections along with the blue of the sky echoing off the water at the lower edge of the canvas. Beyond the bathers can be observed protruding rock-like formations or boulders—with highlights of primary color—that appear to espouse elements of the foreground. Above these cliffs are found several deciduous woody plants of the genus Populus. Though native to many areas of the Northern Hemisphere, the Poplar, with its fastigiate branches tapered towards the top, is especially iconic of the western suburbs of Paris (la banlieue ouest) where Gleizes lived, 24 Avenue Gambetta, Courbevoie. The Gleizes family moved to Avenue Gambetta in 1887. Towards the end of the 19th century and extending through the early 20th century, Courbevoie witnessed a rapid growth in population, and a surge in the development of crafts, industry and transport (including rail). Such a scene of naked bathers actually occurring would have been highly unlikely in Courbevoie, or anywhere else near the Parisian capital.

Optimistic reconciliation

Les Baigneuses—as Robert Delaunay's 1912 City of Paris, and to some extent Jean Metzinger's 1913 Meudon Landscape—juxtaposes sharply contrasting elements. On the one hand the artist includes elements from a society in the process of inexorable industrialization, and on the other, the sereneness of timeless classical nude figures (something rarely painted by Gleizes, as Brooke points out). Yet the relationships between the two are formally resolved. This aspect of simultaneity—the optimistic reconciliation of classical tradition and contemporary life—was of particular interest to Gleizes, as it was to the Section d'Or group of Cubists (also known as the Passy group, or Puteaux group).

The background forms a semi-urban landscape that possesses both rural and semi-industrial components, consistent with Courbevoie of the 1910s (except perhaps for the rock-like outcrops), a village or town with delicate smokestacks or factory chimneys billowing smoke that blends into the cloudy sky. Evidence that factories were already located on the Seine can be seen in Gleizes' Péniches et fumées à Courbevoie of 1908. The statuesque nudes themselves are highly stylized, divided into geometrized facets, planes and curves, yet they are graceful, balletic and elegant. The source of light, rather than beaming down from one particular direction, appears to emanate from within the canvas itself, with an intensification in the vicinity of the bathers.

Gleizes painted L'île de la Jatte many times since 1901 and on at least five occasions between 1907 and 1912:

1907–1909, L'île de la Grande Jatte ou Bord de parc avec rivière animée de canots, pastel pierre noire and ink on bistre paper, 25 × 41.5 cm, private collection

1908, Péniches et fumées à Courbevoie, Crayon, ink and gouache on paper, 23 x 32.5 cm, Fondation Albert Gleizes (Paris)

1908, L'île de la Grande Jatte, fusain and gouache on rose paper, 25 × 41.5 cm, Musée national d'art moderne (Paris)

1908, La Seine près de Courbevoie, oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm, Musée Roybet Fould (Courbevoie)

1912

For Gleizes and those of his entourage 1912 signified a climax in the debates centering around modernism and classicism – Bergson and Nietzsche – Euclid and Riemann – nationalism and regionalism – Poincaré and four-dimensional space. It was precisely during 1912 that Gleizes and Metzinger would write the seminal treatise Du "Cubisme" (Cubism's only manifesto), in an attempt "to put a little order into the chaos of everything that had been written in the papers and reviews since 1911", to use the words of Gleizes.

It was both as artists and theorists (in painting and writing) that Gleizes and Metzinger expressed their critical and ideological discourse about the possible meanings and significance of Cubism and contemporary aesthetics. Indeed, Du "Cubisme" was much more than an unorthodox or anti-academic explanation of the avant-gardist innovations seen in Cubist paintings.

It was natural that Gleizes and Metzinger, both articulate men, should come not just to theorize on the meaning of Cubism, but to defend the movement against attacks leveled in the wake of the 1911 public exhibitions. The two had exhibited regularly at the important salons (Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants) since around 1903 and held divers official positions within them (e.g., hanging committee members). Both were well-versed in philosophy, mathematics and poetry. While Metzinger had participated in discussions at the Bateau Lavoir (from 1907), both he and Gleizes were largely responsible for the impression made by the Cubists on the general public during both the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne of 1910 and 1911 respectively. Intellectual and moral support for their endeavors came from members of the Section d'Or (Groupe de Puteaux).

In contrast, Picasso and Braque remained unknown to the general public and made no recorded statements during the crucial pre-War period. Braque's first brief aphoristic statement regarding Cubism was written in 1917 during his gradual return to health following a head-wound during the war. Picasso's first recorded statement on Cubism is dated 1923, at a time when Dada, Surrealism and Abstract art had become fashionable.

By 1912 art had become much more than a dialogue between artist and nature. "The three dimensions of sensorial volume", Gleizes would write in 1925, "left open the field for the introduction of the time factor".

Cézanne

Cézanne, progressively leading up to 1906, moved away from classic pictorial arrangements, single view perspectives, and outlines that enclosed color. His attempt was to arrive at a "lived perspective" by capturing all the complexities that could be observed with the eye and captured by the senses, where both "sight" and "touch" became one. Cézanne believed his paintings could capture a moment in time, that once passed it was gone, that art and nature are the same. Cézanne claimed: "Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting." The true meaning of painting grew closer as the distance from tradition increased. Just as the Cubists he would inspire, Cézanne had little interest in the rational naturalistic painting and classical geometrical perspective inherited from the Renaissance. "Nor was he satisfied," writes Merleau-Ponty, "with the attempts of the Impressionists to dissolve this objective order into its original elements of light and atmosphere".[sic]

Staticity and dynamism

The preoccupations of Gleizes, to considerable extent beyond those emancipated by Cézanne, was to play with the mobile, dynamic, changing aspects of the same form relative to the position of the painter.

Les Baigneuses, along with other compositions by Gleizes and his fellow Salon Cubists from this period (1911-1912), tend to coordinate a variety of views of the same subject, or a multiplicity (in the Bergsonian sense) of different angles in one picture. This attempt clearly shows the importance of both the time element and the mobile properties in the sequence of events. According to Gleizes, the artist would accommodate either several successive moments in time projected onto a single space, or multiple spaces projected onto the canvas at the same time. These kinematic compositions that took into account both staticity and dynamism were not just a new description of the external world created by the artist, but also the inner world.

Paintings of the Renaissance could not entirely convey these aspects of the world since their subjects were immobilized in a depiction based on one unique point of view; but the real world better corresponds to multiplicity of vision (we have two eyes). And here is precisely where an ambiguity or uncertainty arises as regards interpretation. This period was in fact marked by the unification of disparate concepts. Classical perspective and non-Euclidean geometry were not, after all, incompatible with one another.

The former was simply viewed as a special case contained within a more general concept. Reconciliation between the static classical and modern mobile approach was attainable since within the representation of successive states of an event could be found repeated images fixed for all time (as in the overlapping of several static images). Just as the dynamism of a motion picture results from a succession of still shots, the Cubists stance expounded by Gleizes and Metzinger on theoretical and plastic fronts, consisted of capturing the subject matter or object in a series of 'still shots' (static images) and suturing them together (i.e., several successive moments in time projected onto a single space). Likewise, or alternatively, the artist could depict (multiple spaces projected onto the canvas simultaneously).

There is a subtle difference or distinction between these two types of simultaneity Gleizes describes that deserve closer attention: inscribed onto the canvas could be either (1) the properties of two or more instantiations or physical occurrence happening at the same time from the point of view of one frame of reference (the artist fixed in one position), or (2) the artist could inscribe (paint) the properties of one event represented over a succession of time intervals, observed from several frame of reference (or multiple points of view simultaneously expressed onto the canvas), meaning that the observational reference frame is tied to the state of motion of an observer. There are shared variables between the two concepts, involving the flow of time, i.e., temporal in nature, and involving motion (on the part of either the artist or subject), spatial in nature.

Salon des Indépendants, 1912

At the 1912 Salon des Indépendants Albert Gleizes exhibited Les Baigneuses (no. 1347) — Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant l'escalier was listed in the catalogue (n. 1001) but was supposedly withdrawn — Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited Artillerie (no. 1235) — Robert Delaunay showed his monumental Ville de Paris (no. 868) — Jean Metzinger exhibited La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a horse) and Le Port — Fernand Léger showed La Noce — Henri Le Fauconnier, Le Chasseur (The Huntsman) — and the newcomer Juan Gris exhibited his Portrait of Picasso.

The art critic Olivier-Hourcade writes of this exhibition in 1912 and its relation to the creation of a new French school: 'Metzinger with his Port, Delaunay with Paris, Gleizes with his Baigneuses, are close to this real and magnificent result, this victory comes from several centuries: the creation of a school of painting, 'French' and absolutely independent.

Gleizes, on the other hand, would write the following year (1913) of the movements continual evolution:

The changes it had already undergone since the Indépendants of 1911 could leave people in no doubt as to its nature. Cubism was not a school, distinguished by some superficial variation on a generally accepted norm. It was a total regeneration, indicating the emergence of a wholly new cast of mind. Every season it appeared renewed, growing like a living body. Its enemies could, eventually, have forgiven it if only it had passed away, like a fashion; but they became even more violent when they realised that it was destined to live a life that would be longer than that of those painters who had been the first to assume the responsibility for it.

"Never had a crowd been seen thrown into such a turmoil by works of the spirit, and especially over esemplastic works, paintings, whose nature it is to be silent", writes Albert Gleizes, "Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings—and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself—appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever."

Exhibitions

Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 1912, no. 1347.

Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912, no. 40.

Exposition de Cubistes Français, Musée Rath, Geneva, 3–15 June 1913, no. 8

Moderni Umeni, S.V.U. Mánes, Prague, 1914, no. 36.

La Section d'Or exhibition, 1925, Galerie Vavin-Raspail, Paris

Salon des Indépendants, Trente Ans d'Art Indépendants, 1884–1914, Grand Palais, Paris, 1926, no. 1057.

Les créateurs du cubisme: Galerie Wildenstein, Paris, 1935, no. 31.

Les Maitres de I'Art Indépendants 1895-1937, Petit Palais, Paris, 1937, no. 6.

Albert Gleizes 1881 – 1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, 1964-1965 (no. 31).

Le cubisme, 17 October 2018 – 25 February 2019, Galerie 1, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris. Kunstmuseum Basel, 31 March – 5 August 2019

Literature

Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière, Paris, 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913

Apollinaire, g. Le Petit Bleu, March 20, 1912 (cf. Chroniques d'Art, 1960, p. 230).

Bonfante, E. and Ravenna, J. Arte Cubista con "les Meditations Esthetiques sur la Peinture" di Guillaume Apollinaire, Venice, 1945, no. LVIII.

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Catalogue-Guide, Paris, 1961.

Robbins, Daniel, Albert Gleizes 1881 – 1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, 1964 (catalogue no. 31).

Varichon, Anne, Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes – Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1, Paris, Somogy éditions d'art/Fondation Albert Gleizes, 1998, ISBN 2-85056-286-6.