Passy, Bridges of Paris, also called Les ponts de Paris (Passy), or Paysage à Passy, is a painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The work was exhibited at the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, Rouen, 1912 (titled Passy); the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, 1912 (titled Passy); Manes Moderni Umeni, Vystava, Prague, 1914 (titled Paysage à Passy); and Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, July, 1914.
Passy was one of a small group of works chosen to be reproduced in the seminal treatise Du "Cubisme", written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in 1912 and published by Eugène Figuière the same year. Executed in a highly personal Cubist style with multiple viewpoints and planar faceting, this is one of a number of paintings from 1912-13 involving the theme of the bridge in an urban landscape.
In opposition to classical perspective as a mode of representation, Gleizes employed a new spatial model based in part on the pictorial space of the mathematician Henri Poincaré.
This painting, in the collection of the Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok),Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Albert Gleizes, Les Ponts de Paris (Passy) Vienna, probably refers to the spirit of solidarity among the newly formed "Artists of Passy", during a time when factions had begun to develop within Cubism.
Description Passy (Bridges of Paris) is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 60.5 x 73.2 cm (23.8 by 28.8 inches), signed and dated Alb Gleizes, 1914, lower left.
The works represents an upscale cartier de Paris known as Passy located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, one of the most wealthy districts of the French capital, and traditionally the home of well-known personalities, including Honoré de Balzac, Benjamin Franklin during the nine years that he lived in France, William Kissam Vanderbilt, and the artist Jacques-Emile Blanche.
Les Artistes de Passy was a diverse grouping of avant-garde artistes (painters, sculptors and poets), including several who previously held meetings in 1910 at the rue Visconti studio of Henri Le Fauconnier. Their first diner (Premier dîner des Artistes de Passy) presided over by Paul Fort was held at the house of Balzac, rue Raynouard, in the presence of Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, André Mare, Francis Picabia, Henry Valensi, and Jacques Villon.Cubisme, 1912, Archives, Grande Encyclopédie Larousse Albert Gleizes chose to Passy as the subject of this painting.
Instead of depicting a bowl of fruit or a man playing a guitar under the influence of African art, Gleizes turns toward a non-Euclidean model of geometry as a source of inspiration for Passy. This work signified the rejection of Euclidean geometry and its correlate; the quantitative measurement of spatial depth governing perspective invented during the Renaissance, an unquestioned principle of academic painting that had persisted to date.Alex Mittelmann, State of the Modern Art World, The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time, 2011
Vanishing points have been abolished. A perspectival grid is gone. Forms are not clearly delineated. Colors are synthetic and limited, not overpowering. Light and reflected light do not come from a consistent unidirectional source. There is no precisely clear relationship between structures (e.g., buildings, bridges) based on overlapping or on diminished scale with distance to show depth of field as objects recede from the foreground. Here Gleizes brakes all the rules. Perhaps for this reason Passy was chosen as an example of new painting for publication in their manifesto; Du "Cubisme".Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001, Albert Gleizes, Passy (Ponts de Paris), reproduced Fig. 59Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881-1953
Background Antliff and Leighten write of Passy (Ponts de Paris) in Cubism and Culture:
Instead of this [academic] spatial model, Cubists turned to new models of geometry and the 'fourth dimension' as inspiration for the works like Gleizes's Passy (Ponts de Paris) of 1912, which he and Metzinger reproduced in their tract Du Cubisme as exemplary of art expressing their ideas. This urban landscape synthesized the river, trees, clouds, buildings, steel bridges and smoke of the modern city. Partially geometrized forms—such as the green arc of tree on the upper left or arched doors and windows on the rectangular buildings in the center—are subjectively evoked through limited colour range; shifting perspectives, signified by long vertical and diagonal bands cutting off the edges of objects contained within them; and shifting relative scales of objects, such as the two steel bridge spans. [...] the Cubists justified this novel approach to pictorial space in part on the basis of the mathematician Henri Poincaré's theory of 'conventionalism'.
The existence of a fourth dimension, according to Poincaré, could not be ruled out by observation alone. "If the number of dimensions comes from the way in which we are made", Poincaré hypothesized, "there might be thinking beings living in our world, but made differently from us, who would think that space has more or less than three dimensions."
Thus the characteristic property of space, that of having three dimensions, is only a property of our distribution board, a property residing, so to speak, in the human intelligence. The destruction of some of these connections that is to say of these associations of ideas, would be sufficient to give us a different distribution board, and that might be enough to endow space with a fourth dimension. (Poincaré, 1897)Henri Poincaré, The Relativity of Space, from Science & Method, 1897
Poincaré stressed the importance of understanding the relativity of space. Space is in reality amorphous, according to Poincaré, only things that occupy space give it a form:
One part of space is not by itself and in the absolute sense of the word equal to another part of space, for if it is so for us, it will not be so for the inhabitants of the universe B, and they have precisely as much right to reject our opinion as we have to condemn theirs.
I have shown elsewhere what are the consequences of these facts from the point of view of the idea that we should construct non-Euclidean and other analogous geometries. (Poincaré, 1897)
Consistent with the view of Poincaré, Euclidean geometry represented one configuration among many equally valid geometric models that Gleizes could have chosen. With this newfound liberty, he was free to transform Passy in accord with his own subjectivity. This radical break from classical conventions was not without its parallel in Nietzschean free will and freedom of expression. In an essay on the Cubism of Metzinger published September 1911, Gleizes wrote of his compatriot as a disciple of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who 'invents his own truth' by destroying 'old values'.Albert Gleizes, L'Art et ses représentants. Jean Metzinger, Revue Indépendante, Paris, September, 1911, pp. 161–172
Since the classical Euclidean notion of 'fixed' absolute space explicitly informed the fictive 'moment' of absolute time, the Cubists jettisoned the idea of placing the observer at a privileged spatial position at a fixed moment in time. Now, according to the theoretical deliberations of Gleizes and Metzinger, artists were free to move around the subject matter, depicting multiple views 'simultaneously', whereby several successive moments in time could be captured and projected onto the canvas at once. In the process, the 'total image' produced over a period of time was more complete than a single instantaneous view.
The intervention of memory in the process of representation was an important criterion for Henri Poincaré (as it would be too for the philosopher Henri Bergson, post-Symbolist writers and Gleizes himself):
Besides, we have to make a representation, not of a complexus of simultaneous sensations, but of a complexus of successive sensations, following one another in a determined order, and it is for this reason that I said just now that the intervention of memory is necessary. (Poincaré, 1897)
"Absolute space exists no longer" writes Poincaré; "there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body".
We define a point by the succession of movements we require to make to reach it, starting from a certain initial position of the body. The axes are accordingly attached to this initial position of the body.
But the position I call initial may be arbitrarily chosen from among all the positions my body has successively occupied. If a more or less unconscious memory of these successive positions is necessary for the genesis of the notion of space, this memory can go back more or less into the past. Hence results a certain indeterminateness in the very definition of space, and it is precisely this indeterminateness which constitutes its relativity.
Memory would play an important role in Les Ponts de Paris (Passy), as it did in Gleizes' Le Chemin (Paysage à Meudon), Portrait of Jacques Nayral, painted in 1911, Man on a Balcony of 1912, and Portrait de l’éditeur Eugène Figuière, of 1913: Both the content and form in these paintings were the result of mind associations as he completed the works from memory; something that would play a crucial role in the works of other Cubists, such as Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia.
Cubist factions Disparate inspirations during a proto-Cubist phase had already yielded several related methods of expressing the geometric experience (what Gleizes and Metzinger would soon attribute to mobile perspective). Cubism was in the eye of the beholder; it could be seen as a process, a system, a state of mind, an inspired attitude that would develop a new symbolic structure, a reflection of the changing world.
Despite their similarities, works produced by diverse artists were neither homogeneous nor isotropic. This venture was essentially nonlinear. Cubism was omnidirectional, growing like a tree with many branches. The progression of each artist was unique. Even when paths would cross, artists would not necessarily fall under one another's influence. Despite a growing awareness, a 'collective consciousness' based on a nonacademic passion for structure and mobility, and despite the sense of group unity that would attain a maxima circa 1912, deep-seated differences arose sporadically, often fueled by critics and dealers.
In Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curator and art historian Daniel Robbins writes of Passy:
A synthesis of the modern city with its smoke, river and steel bridges, this work probably refers also to the spirit of solidarity among the newly formed "Artists of Passy". In this sense it indicates an awareness of factions within Cubism. (Robbins, 1964)Daniel Robbins, 1964, Albert Gleizes 1881 – 1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund