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Albert Gleizes

PAINTING
and
MAN BECOME PAINTER

Albert Gleizes: Mouvement à taches bleues, 1943
Oil on canvas, 115.5x156cm


Albert Gleizes wrote Peinture et l'homme devenu peintre in 1948. It was his last book length essay before he died in 1953 and can therefore be regarded as something of a testament. It concentrates much more than the earlier Homocentrisme, Vie et Mort de l'occident chrétien, Forme et Histoire  or even La Peinture et ses lois, on the act of painting, less on the overall historical-theological context. Gleizes thought he had a publisher in 1948 - éditions Bordas, founded in 1944, which, in addition to publishing Samuel Beckett's Murphy in 1947, also in the same period published books illustrated by Marc Chagall, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Pablo Picasso (the publishing house subsequently specialised in school text books). Gleizes was assured of the intention to publish his manuscript until April 1950, when it was returned to him. The book was not published until 1998 (Somogy, Editions d'art).

The full text (without illustrations) can be downloaded as a Word document here.


[Headings in capital letters are by Gleizes, subheadings by me]

NOTICE Non-Figurative art. From the painter as an observer to painting as an act

Note on Space and Time

ONE

Non-figurative art - the subject becomes a phantom, but is still a subject
The phantom subject as it appears in physics

TWO

Nineteenth century pioneers - Baudelaire and Delacroix
Sérusier - Van Gogh - Cézanne
Signac - Matisse - Redon - Bonnard

THREE

Cubism - variations on the subject
Towards the object

FOUR

Capacities of the eye

THE CRAFT

1. Knowledge of materials
2. Drawing and colour

TRANSLATION

ROTATION

Movement as a property of the eye
Continuous, not saccadic

RHYTHM

COLOUR

Consciousness of light
Pre-existent tonality
Colour in translation - childrens drawing
Colour in rotation - the chromatic circle
What needs to be taught
The first complete exercise

MODES OF EXPRESSION

The accidental image
The hieratic image
Mural painting

CONCLUSION