There is not a canvas of that time that does not foreshadow the overthrow of the foundations on which the human race thought itself firmly establishe… - Albert Gleizes

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There is not a canvas of that time that does not foreshadow the overthrow of the foundations on which the human race thought itself firmly established, where it felt itself secure. At the moment when the Ballets Russes were at their height, when the Neo-Impressionists and Fauves had dispensed with the drawing style of the Renaissance because it could not contain the purity of the colour - these humbly painted, angular, grey, ascetic pictures were, really, an unwelcome sight. It was not any upheaval of a geological nature that they prefigured, but a cataclysm in the human order. No tremor of the earth was registered, but a tremor of the spirit that disturbed the intellect of civilised man, too long the slave of his immobilised senses. At last he was beginning to suspect that something dangerous was approaching.

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About Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes (8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953) was a French artist who lived and worked in Paris for many years. Inspired by the work of Paul Cézanne, he is one of the founders of Cubism, along with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Jean Metzinger.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Albert Leon Gleizes Albert Léon Gleizes Gleizes
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Additional quotes by Albert Gleizes

Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'être. We should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers, or landscape, or faces whose mere reflection it might have been. Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; not yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised to the level of a pure effusion at the first step.

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, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself - appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.

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