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Form and History

Homage to Albert Gleizes


A large collection of material relating to Gleizes and his school can be found on my previous website here.

My book Albert Gleizes - For and against the twentieth century (Yale University Press, 2001) is currently out of print but remaindered and second hand copies can be found without too much difficulty.

My translations of Gleizes's writings - Art and Religion, Art and Science, Art and Production and Painting and Its Laws can be obtained here.

Texts by Gleizes
A work in progress including English translations of Gleizes's general account of the history of Cubism, published by the Bauhaus in 1928; Painting and Man become Painter, Gleizes's last book length text, 1948, the summary of a lifelong research into form and colour; and a new translation of Gleizes's best known writing, Du "Cubisme", written in collaboration with Jean Metzinger, together with a collection of related texts and an extensive introduction.

Albert Gleizes in New York

Gleizes was in New York from 1915 to 1919 together with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. It was a troubled, enigmatic but ultimately very important period in his life and in his overall development as a painter ...  

Two essays on Gleizes by Dom Angelico Surchamp, founder of the Zodiaque series of books on Romanesque art (these essays are given in the original French)

Cubism and Theology 

A discussion of the respective views of the Dutch Calvinist Hans Rookmaaker (Modern art and the death of a culture) and Albert Gleizes.

Gleizes, Coomaraswamy and 'tradition'
An account of Gleizes's relations with the 'esoteric' school of Ananda Coomaraswamy and René Guénon

Humanism and Technology
A preliminary comparison of the thinking of Gleizes and Martin Heidegger 

The Continuity of Moly Sabata at Ampuis
A brief account of my experience working with the potter Genevieve Dalban.

Drawings by Mainie Jellett
A collection of preparatory drawings illustrating the early stages of the development of the technique of translation-rotation. 

 Moly Sabata Exhibition 2012
Photographs of the work of three potters - Anne Dangar, Genevieve Dalban and Aguilberte Dalban - associated with Gleizes's project for a return to the earth at Moly Sabata, Sablons, Isère.

 Cubism and Tradition - The liturgical art of Albert Gleizes and his school

Substance of a talk given in Oxford, November 2015. Includes discussion of work by Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Robert Pouyaud, Daniel Gloria and René Dürrbach, as well as Gleizes.

Victor Poznanski and the exhibition L'Art d'aujourd'hui, 1925

Poznanski, scion of a wealthy Polish industrial and banking family, studied painting under Gleizes in the 1920s, the period when Gleizes was working out his basic principles. He organised and paid for the exhibition L'Art d'aujurd'hui, which was the first major attempt in Paris to show how non-representational art had become an international movement.