The Bathers (French: Les Baigneuses) is a large oil painting created at the outset of 1912 by the French artist Albert Gleizes. It was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1912; the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, Rouen, summer 1912; and the Salon de la Section d'Or, autumn 1912.Exhibit catalog for Salon de "La Section d'Or", 1912. Walter Pach papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution The painting was reproduced in Du "Cubisme", written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger the same year: the first and only manifesto on Cubism. Les Baigneuses, while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form and multiple perspective characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1912. Highly sophisticated, both in theory and in practice, this aspect of simultaneity would soon become identified with the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deploys these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner".David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, Yale University Press, 1998 Purchased in 1937, the painting is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.Albert Gleizes, Les Baigneuses, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Online collection entry
Description
Les Baigneuses is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 105 x 171 cm (41.3 by 67.3 inches), signed Albert Gleizes and dated 1912, lower left. This work, painted at the outset of 1912, represents a series of naked elegant women at various points in the landscape foreground, their reflections along with the blue of the sky echoing off the water at the lower edge of the canvas. Beyond the bathers can be observed protruding rock-like formations or boulders—with highlights of primary color—that appear to espouse elements of the foreground. Above these cliffs are found several deciduous woody plants of the genus Populus. Though native to many areas of the Northern Hemisphere, the Poplar, with its fastigiate branches tapered towards the top, is especially iconic of the western suburbs of Paris (la banlieue ouest) where Gleizes lived, 24 Avenue Gambetta, Courbevoie.Armory Show entry form for Albert Gleizes' painting La Femme aux Phlox, not after 1913. Walt Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Document shows Gleizes' address The Gleizes family moved to Avenue Gambetta in 1887.Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881-1953 Towards the end of the 19th century and extending through the early 20th century, Courbevoie witnessed a rapid growth in population, and a surge in the development of crafts, industry and transport (including rail). Such a scene of naked bathers actually occurring would have been highly unlikely in Courbevoie, or anywhere else near the Parisian capital.
Optimistic reconciliation Les Baigneuses—as Robert Delaunay's 1912 City of Paris, and to some extent Jean Metzinger's 1913 Meudon Landscape—juxtaposes sharply contrasting elements. On the one hand the artist includes elements from a society in the process of inexorable industrialization, and on the other, the sereneness of timeless classical nude figures (something rarely painted by Gleizes, as Brooke points out). Yet the relationships between the two are formally resolved. This aspect of simultaneity—the optimistic reconciliation of classical tradition and contemporary life—was of particular interest to Gleizes, as it was to the Section d'Or group of Cubists (also known as the Passy group, or Puteaux group).Daniel Robbins, 1964, Albert Gleizes 1881 - 1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund.
The background forms a semi-urban landscape that possesses both rural and semi-industrial components, consistent with Courbevoie of the 1910s (except perhaps for the rock-like outcrops), a village or town with delicate smokestacks or factory chimneys billowing smoke that blends into the cloudy sky. Evidence that factories were already located on the Seine can be seen in Gleizes' Péniches et fumées à Courbevoie of 1908.Albert Gleizes, 1908, Péniches et fumées à Courbevoie, Fondation Albert Gleizes, Paris The statuesque nudes themselves are highly stylized, divided into geometrized facets, planes and curves, yet they are graceful, balletic and elegant. The source of light, rather than beaming down from one particular direction, appears to emanate from within the canvas itself, with an intensification in the vicinity of the bathers.
Gleizes painted L'île de la Jatte many times since 1901 and on at least five occasions between 1907 and 1912:
1907–1909, L'île de la Grande Jatte ou Bord de parc avec rivière animée de canots, pastel pierre noire and ink on bistre paper, , private collection 1908, Péniches et fumées à Courbevoie, Crayon, ink and gouache on paper, 23 x 32.5 cm, Fondation Albert Gleizes (Paris) 1908, L'île de la Grande Jatte, fusain and gouache on rose paper, , Musée national d'art moderne (Paris) 1908, La Seine près de Courbevoie, oil on canvas, , Musée Roybet Fould (Courbevoie) 1908, Barque à Courbevoie, fusain and chalk on paper, 30 x 38 cm, art market (Paris)
The subject matter of Les Baigneuses, much as that of his monumental Harvest Threshing of the same year, is derived from an unsentimental observation of the world.
Gleizes' interest centered on many things in the years leading up to 1912, one of which was the dynamic qualities of modern urban life. Les Baigneuses, depicts "a harmonious and balanced landscape in which industrial and urban elements are imbricated with the surrounding countryside;" writes Cottington in Cubism in the Shadow of War, "Poussinesque in its organizing geometry and Claudian in its specificity of place, this is the landscape not of Arcadia but of France as Gleizes wished it to be." Gleizes' formal innovations seen in this work are more closely related to the Salon Cubists (Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger) than to those of the Gallery Cubists (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque).
The gestures of the bathers in the 'foreground' and the whirls of chimney-smoke in the 'background' are unified expressively through "a timeless and purportedly natural order." While the subject was "explicit in its reference to latinist classicism" writes Cottington, "and implicit in its rejection of the avant-gardist challenge of the futurists to avoid the pictorial representation of the nude as inescapably passé", he continues, "the presence of emblems of industrialization, not juxtaposed but integrated with the rhythms of the landscape, marked a definite, if tentative, departure from the concerns he had shared with Le Fauconnier." Gleizes made use of fragmentation of form, multiple perspective views (i.e., mobile and dynamic, rather than static and from one point-of-view) along with linear and planar structural qualities. Though highly sophisticated in theory, this aspect of simultaneity would actually become quite commonly employed within the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deployed these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner" (Cottington, 1998).
1912
For Gleizes and those of his entourage 1912 signified a climax in the debates centering around modernism and classicism – Bergson and Nietzsche – Euclid and Riemann – nationalism and regionalism – Poincaré and four-dimensional space. It was precisely during 1912 that Gleizes and Metzinger would write the seminal treatise Du "Cubisme" (Cubism's only manifesto),[Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière, Paris, 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913] in an attempt "to put a little order into the chaos of everything that had been written in the papers and reviews since 1911", to use the words of Gleizes.Albert Gleizes, 1925, The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form, published in German, 1928, under the title Kubismus, the French version was published as L'Epopée (The Epic), in the journal Le Rouge et le Noir, 1929. Translation by Peter Brooke
It was both as artists and theorists (in painting and writing) that Gleizes and Metzinger expressed their critical and ideological discourse about the possible meanings and significance of Cubism and contemporary aesthetics. Indeed, Du "Cubisme" was much more than an unorthodox or anti-academic explanation of the avant-gardist innovations seen in Cubist paintings.
It was natural that Gleizes and Metzinger, both articulate men, should come not just to theorize on the meaning of Cubism, but to defend the movement against attacks leveled in the wake of the 1911 public exhibitions. The two had exhibited regularly at the important salons (Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants) since around 1903 and held divers official positions within them (e.g., hanging committee members). Both were well-versed in philosophy, mathematics and poetry. While Metzinger had participated in discussions at the Bateau Lavoir (from 1907), both he and Gleizes were largely responsible for the impression made by the Cubists on the general public during both the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne of 1910 and 1911 respectively. Intellectual and moral support for their endeavors came from members of the Section d'Or (Groupe de Puteaux).Herschel Browning Chipp, with contributions by Peter Howard Selz and Joshua C. Taylor, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1968
In contrast, Picasso and Braque remained unknown to the general public and made no recorded statements during the crucial pre-War period. Braque's first brief aphoristic statement regarding Cubism was written in 1917 during his gradual return to health following a head-wound during the war. Picasso's first recorded statement on Cubism is dated 1923, at a time when Dada, Surrealism and Abstract art had become fashionable.
By 1912 art had become much more than a dialogue between artist and nature. "The three dimensions of sensorial volume", Gleizes would write in 1925, "left open the field for the introduction of the time factor".Albert Gleizes, "Cubisme", Vers une conscience plastique, Essai de généralisation, 1925, in Bulletin de l'Effort Moderne, 22–32, February 1926–Feb 1927. Also published in La Vie des Lettres et des Arts, May 1925 (written as part of the Bauhaus book, Kubismus). See too Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century, 2001,
"The diversity of the relations of line to line must be indefinite;" write Gleizes and Metzinger, "on this condition it incorporates quality, the incommensurable sum of the affinities perceived between that which we discern and that which pre-exists within us: on this condition a work of art is able to move us".
Cézanne