''Woman with Black Glove'' (French: ''Femme au gant noir'', or ''Femme Assise'') is a painting by the French artist, theorist and writer

Albert Gleizes Albert Gleizes (; 8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953) was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on ...

. Painted in 1920, after returning to Paris in the wake of World War I, the paintings highly abstract structure is consistent with style of experimentation that transpired during the second synthetic phase of

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

, called

Crystal Cubism Crystal Cubism (French: ''Cubisme cristal'' or ''Cubisme de cristal'') is a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift, between 1915 and 1916, towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. The p ...

. As other post-wartime works by Gleizes, ''Woman with Black Glove'' represents a break from the first phase of Cubism, with emphasis placed on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. There are several smaller versions of ''Woman with Black Glove'', illustrating a facet of Gleizes' pursuits during the early 1920s: "reminiscences of specific reality evoked within the context of increasingly careful picture construction", writes art historian Daniel Robbins.Daniel Robbins, 1964, ''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
/ref> ''Woman with Black Glove'' was exhibited at the

Salon d'Automne The Salon d'Automne (; en, Autumn Salon), or Société du Salon d'automne, is an art exhibition held annually in Paris, France. Since 2011, it is held on the Champs-Élysées, between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, in mid-October. The ...

, Grand Palais, Paris, 15 October – 12 December 1920. The work was reproduced in Floréal: ''l'hebdomadaire illustré du monde du travail'', no. 45, 11 December 1920 (titled ''Peinture avec femme assise'').''Au Salon d'Automne'', ''Avant la fermeture du Salon d'Automne'', Floréal (Éd. hebdomadaire): l'hebdomadaire illustré du monde du travail, n. 45, 11 December 1920
Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France Formerly in the private collection of Juliette Roche-Gleizes (wife of the artist), ''Woman with Black Glove'' is located at the

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

Description

''Woman with Black Glove'' is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 126 x 100 cm (49.6 x 39.37 inches), signed Albert Gleizes, lower right, and dated 1.1.1920. As indicated by the title, the work represents a woman wearing a glove. She is seated on an angle facing toward left with respect to the viewer. Her face and head are composed of simple geometric shapes (circles, arcs, rectangles or squares) that delineate the woman's eyes, nose and mouth. Her hair, coiffed in chignon hairstyle, is treated in a series of concentric circles. Her clothed body is constructed with seemingly arbitrary forms, and is place within a background composition of highly geometric interconnected planes or surfaces. An arch toward the upper left is reminiscent of a doorway or window, but there is no indication whether the scene is an interior or exterior representation. The overall color scheme is warm, consisting of red through yellow, browns and tans (

earth tone Earth tone is a color scheme with multiple meanings. In its narrowest sense, it refers to "any color containing some brown" – the color of ground or soil (earth). It can also refer to "natural colors" (colors found in nature) such as brown soil, ...

ochre Ochre ( ; , ), or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produced ...

s), and black, along with varying shades of cool gray. The artists use of bold contrasts between light and dark affect the entire composition. However, there is a striking absence of chiaroscuro modeling that would otherwise indicate a sense of volume in modeling the three-dimensional figure, or give a sense of the direction of light cast upon the model. The overt distillation of the composition, with its emphasis placed on flat surface activity, large overlapping planes, and the primacy of the underlying geometric structure rooted in the abstract, is consistent with

.Christopher Green, ''Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928'', Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 13-47, 215.

Background

In an article on the topic of the 1920

exhibition, published in , 1920, the art critic Castaing writes of Gleizes' entry, ''Femme au gant noir'':

Gleizes has sent a very pure portrait of a woman. He is a researcher and this is intelligence. We feel in him something new and strong. His painting for the
great hall A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, castle or a large manor house or hall house in the Middle Ages, and continued to be built in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries, although by then the family used the gr ...
s of future cities project a flamboyance of colors to which we were not accustom [''Gleizes a envoyé un portrait de femme très pur. C'est un chercheur et c'est une intelligence. On sent en lui quelque chose de neuf et de fort. Sa peinture pour les grands halls des cités futures dégage un flamboiement de couleurs auquel il ne nous avait pas habitués''].

Gleizes's works from this period are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern."Daniel Robbins, ''Albert Gleizes'', Grove Art Online, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Oxford University Press, 2009
/ref> This unity, and the highly crystalline geometricized materialization consisting of superimposed constituent planes, ultimately referred to by the French poet and art critic

Maurice Raynal Portrait of Maurice Raynal (1911), by Juan Gris. Maurice Raynal (3 February 1884, Paris – 18 September 1954, Suresnes) was a French art critic and an ardent propagandist of cubism. Some publications *''Essai de Définition de la Peinture Cu ...

,Christopher Green, ''Late Cubism'', MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
/ref> would soon be described by Gleizes in '' La Peinture et ses lois'' (1922–23), as 'simultaneous movements of translation and rotation of the plane'.Peter Brooke, ''Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century'', Yale University Press, 2001

/ref> The synthetic factor was taken furthest of all from within the Cubists by Gleizes. Basing himself on his 1915 abstractions, Gleizes sought to clarify his intentions and methods further still in ''La Peinture et ses lois'', deducing the fundamental principles of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the universal physical laws. These theoretical postulates, later referred to as translation-rotation, according to Robbins, rank "with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art. The case of ''Woman with Black Glove'', however, entails the acceptance of both representation and geometric forms. Following the First World War, Gleizes deliberately purged his art of visible brushstrokes, of the artists physical gesture, which amounted to what he called a "aesthetic trick". Instead, his attention became focused on the associations between various geometric structures.Helen Topliss, ''Anne Dangar at Moly-Sabata, Tradition and Innovation'', National Gallery of Australia
/ref> The attempt was to arrive at a fundamental unity of the picture plane, through the deployment of highly crystalline geometricized superimpositions of constituent surfaces, described by Gleizes, in ''La Peinture et ses lois'' as 'simultaneous movements of translation and rotation of the plane'. The problem set out by Gleizes was to replace ''anecdote'' as a starting point for the work of art, by the sole means of using the elements of the painting itself: line, form and color. Beginning with an elementary form such as a central rectangle, Gleizes mechanically juxtaposed forms to create a painting: (1) either by reproducing the initial form (employing various symmetries such as reflectional, rotational or translational), or by modifying (or not) its dimensions.Pierre Alibert, ''Gleizes, Naissance et avenir du cubisme'', Aubin-Visconti, Edition Dumas, Saint-Etienne, October 1982, (2) By displacement of the initial form; pivoting around an imaginary axis in one direction or another.Albert Gleizes, ''La Peinture et ses lois, Ce qui devait sortir du cubisme'', La Vie des lettres et des arts, 1922-3, 1924 in book form The choice of position (through translation and/or rotation), though based on the inspiration of the artist, is no longer attributed to the ''anecdotal''. An objective and rigorous method, independent of the painter, replaces emotion or sensibility in the determination the placement of form, that is, through ''translation'' and ''rotation''. According to Gleizes, 'translation' represented an unfolding of planes as seen against the surface of a painting (a square or rectangular); 'rotation' occurred when these planes began to shift around a central point. In ''La peinture ou de l’homme devenu peintre'', Gleizes writes:

Painting by its nature is not a spectacle, nor an object seen via a point of perspective, it is instead its own object. There are three types of expression in objective painting: there is the pure work, without recourse to recollected or written history. There is the work which freely experiences recalled imagery by coincidental interrelation of melodic lines. Finally there is the work where an iconographic subject has been freely undertaken.

Already in 1920, Gleizes had published his views on this new technique of painting in ''Du Cubisme et les moyens de le comprendre'', in which he insists that the 2-dimensional planar surface, with clearly defined limits, is the primary reality in painting, and that the artist should work with it, as opposed to against it. He argues that Cubism had been a search for a precise scientific method to replace the old scientific method of one-point perspective, and that the essential elements of this new method are now known.Albert Gleizes, ''Du Cubisme et les moyens de le comprendre'', Paris (eds "La Cigogne) 1921Peter Brooke, ''Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1920''
/ref>

Related works

File:Albert Gleizes, 1914-15, Portrait of an Army Doctor (Portrait d'un médecin militaire), oil on canvas, 119.8 x 95.1 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1914–15, '' Portrait of an Army Doctor (Portrait d'un médecin militaire)'', oil on canvas, 119.8 x 95.1 cm,

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

File:Albert Gleizes, 1920, Figure, gouache on canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1920, ''Figure'', gouache on canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm,

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 19 ...

File:Albert Gleizes, Action, Cahiers Individualistes de philosophie et d'art, Volume 1, No. 1, February 1920.jpg, Albert Gleizes, ''Action, Cahiers Individualistes de philosophie et d'art'', Volume 1, No. 1, February 1920 File:Albert Gleizes, c.1920, Figures planes, dimensions approximately 126 x 100 cm, location unknown..jpg, Albert Gleizes, c.1920, ''Figures planes (Trois personnages assis)'', dimensions approximately 126 x 100 cm, location unknown. Exhibited Der Sturm, Berlin, 1921 (no. 927) and reproduced in Gleizes 1927, p. 97. File:Albert Gleizes, 1920, Femme et enfant (Woman and child).jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1920, ''Femme et enfant'' (''Woman and child''), reproduced in Der Sturm, 5 October 1921 File:Albert Gleizes, Woman and child (Frau und Kind), Der Sturm, 5 October 1921.jpg, Albert Gleizes, ''Woman and child (Frau und Kind)'', Der Sturm, 5 October 1921 File:Albert Gleizes, Broom, An International Magazine Of The Arts, November 1921.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1920, ''Ecuyère'' (''Horsewoman''), oil on canvas, 130 x 93 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, published in ''Broom, An International Magazine of the Arts'', November 1921. This 1920 painting was reworked in 1923 File:Albert Gleizes, 1920-23, Ecuyère, oil on canvas, 130 x 93 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1920–23, ''Ecuyère'' (''Horsewoman''), oil on canvas, 130 x 93 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (Purchased from the artist in 1951. Dépôt du

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

, 1998). This 1920 painting was reworked in 1923 File:Albert Gleizes, c.1920, L'Homme dans les maisons, La Vie des Lettres (cover illustration), Jacques Povolozky & Cie, Paris, 1920.jpg, Albert Gleizes, c.1920, ''L'Homme dans les maisons'', cover illustration of ''La Vie des Lettres et des Arts'', Jacques Povolozky & Cie, Paris, 1920 File:Albert Gleizes, 1920, Femme portant un enfant, Exposition Internationale d'Art Moderne, Geneva, 26 December 1920 - 25 January 1921, No. 185.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1920, ''Femme portant un enfant'', Exposition Internationale d'Art Moderne, Geneva, 26 December 1920 - 25 January 1921, No. 185 File:Albert Gleizes, 1921, Composition bleu et jaune (Composition jaune), oil on canvas, 200.5 x 110 cm DSC00547.jpg, Albert Gleizes, 1921, ''Composition bleu et jaune (Composition jaune)'', oil on canvas, 200.5 x 110 cm File:Albert Gleizes, Zeichnung, Der Sturm, 5 June 1920..jpg, Albert Gleizes, untitled, drawing (zeichnung), published in the cover of Der Sturm, Volume 11, Number 11-12, 5 December 1920

Selected exhibitions

* Salon d'Automne, Grand Palais, Paris, 15 October – 12 December 1920 * Marlborough Gallery, London, 1956, no. 13 (as Femme Assise) * Musee Calvet, Avignon, 1962, no. 17 * Musee de Grenoble, 1963, no. 23.

References

External links