Albert Gleizes - Legacy

Legacy

"Gleizes' individual development, his unique struggle to reconcile forces, made him one of the few painters to come out of Cubism with a wholly individual style, undeflected by later artistic movements. Although he occasionally returned to earlier subjects... these later works were treated anew, on the basis of fresh insights. He never repeated his earlier styles, never remained stationary, but always grew more intense, more passionate."

"Albert Gleizes is perhaps the only painter of our century to have consciously struggled between the demands of reason and faith, in a reasonable—indeed a brilliant—manner and finally to have come down on the side of faith. Like Pascal it is possible to regard him as an apologist for intellectual orthodoxy but it is also possible to regard him as a lucid sceptic who consistently demonstrated that no firm decisions are possible in any area of human activity. He was a metaphysician in an age that wanted not only to reject metaphysics but to deny the relevance of its unanswerable questions. For Gleizes, such a denial was equivalent to denying the grandeur of Man. His life ended in 1953 but his paintings remain to testify to his willingness to struggle for final answers. His is an abstract art of deep significance and meaning, paradoxically human even in his very search for absolute order and truth." (Daniel Robbins, 1964)