Femme au gant noir (1920) by Albert Gleizes

Born in Paris in 1881, the son of a successful fabric designer, Gleizes graduated from school and finished a four year tour with the French Army before beginning to paint at the age of 21. His early work was self taught and roughly in keeping with the popular French Impressionist style. Six years later, he was introduced to Fauvism and showed a passing interest. The innovative use of unconventional color to represent forms in pure geometry was doubtlessly a strong influence.

By the time Gleizes painted his Femme au gant noir at the age of 39, he had pioneered the Cubist movement. He wrote a treatise on Cubism and even claimed to have invented the style himself. This painting represents a pinnacle of the movement , refined through the austere years of the first world war. Here the colors are hot red and yellow with cold black and white. Geizes' complicated formulae for orienting a geometric form in space are clearly on display. 

While the patterns convey materials, fabrics, architecture, anatomy, etc. this work transcends the phenomenal and approaches the mysterious fourth dimension of time-space. He sought to convey not a subject-image, but a subjectless-image. The representation of three dimensionality is furthered by rotating and juxtaposing the forms of the figure to suggest her movement in space and in relation to the viewer. 

This painting is currently on view at the National Gallery of Australia



• Ayous wood .75″ (1.9 cm) thick frame from renewable forests
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil (0.26 mm)
• Paper weight: 5.57 oz/y² (189 g/m²)
• Lightweight
• Acrylite front protector
• Hanging hardware included
• Blank product components in the US sourced from Japan and the US
• Blank product components in the EU sourced from Japan and Latvia