Albert Gleizes Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting.

Albert Gleizes
If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems.

Albert Gleizes
We laugh out loud when we think of all the novices who expiate their literal understanding of the remarks of a cubist and their faith in absolute truth by laboriously placing side by side the six faces of a cube and both ears of a model seen in profile.

Albert Gleizes
People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances.

Albert Gleizes
All the constructions of this first phase of the youth of the group bear witness to its constant characteristics. The epic imagination is a proof of its esemplastic power. Everything is formal, inventive and arithmetical, therefore rhythmic.

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.

Albert Gleizes
We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile.

Albert Gleizes
The first manifestations of Cubism took people by surprise because their minds, ill-adapted as they are to the idea of movement, are never able, on the basis of what is in front of them, to envisage what is to come.

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

Albert Gleizes
What madman, or what clever-dick with the instincts of a counterfeiter was the first to paint a sphere in trompe l'oeil on a surface that is vertical and rigorously flat! And that's what they teach at the Beaux-Arts! How could such idiocies ever have survived the verdict of Pascal?

Albert Gleizes
Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer.

Albert Gleizes
But we cannot enjoy in isolation; we wish to dazzle others with that which we daily snatch from the world of sense, and in return we wish others to show us their trophies. From a reciprocity of concessions arise those mixed images, which we hasten to confront with artistic creations in order to compute what they contain of the objective; that is of the purely conventional

Albert Gleizes
In nearly all the papers, all composure was lost. The critics would begin by saying: there is no need to devote much space to the Cubists, who are utterly without importance, and then they furiously gave them seven columns out of the ten that were taken up, at that time, by the Salon.

Albert Gleizes
We were still attached to the representational image. We cut into the form, the different angles from which it could be seen, the perspective. The object turned in our hands, we turned round it. We were tortured by this mystery of form.

Albert Gleizes
I wish to establish the true history of Cubism whose beginning was not a matter of mere chance, something dependent on a throw of the dice, but clearly linked to that revaluation of all the values of whose absolute necessity no-one in these days can be in any doubt.

Albert Gleizes
In opposition to the immobile means of expression that the Academy was teaching, these painters threw down like a challenge a mobile expression; to volumes situated in space they preferred the living dynamism of coloured form in evolution.

Albert Gleizes
We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone.

Albert Gleizes
It was around 1910/11 that everyone, at every level of the social scale, became aware of those apparent eccentricities that were challenging the precarious certainties of the world. And it was uniquely the painting of a group, not of an individual, that was the cause.

Albert Gleizes