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''Man on a Balcony'' (also known as ''Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud'' and L'Homme au balcon''), is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). The painting was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1912 (no. 689). The Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric art'. Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrates the principles of the movement in this monumental painting (over six feet tall) with its projecting planes and fragmented lines.〔(The Armory Show at 100, Albert Gleizes, ''Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud)'' )〕 The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes's ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences.〔Michael R. Taylor, from Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art (2007)〕〔 In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of modern art known as Cubism to an American audience at the Armory Show in New York City, Chicago and Boston. In addition to ''Man on a balcony'' (no. 196), Gleizes exhibited his 1910 painting ''Femme aux Phlox'' (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).〔(Armory Show entry, Albert Gleizes' painting ''La Femme aux Phlox'', 1910, Walt Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution )〕〔(Catalogue of International Exhibition of Modern Art ), Exhibition held at the Armory of the 69th Infantry, New York, from Feb. 15 to March 15, 1913〕 ''Man on a Balcony'' was reproduced in L'Excelsior, ''Au Salon d'Automne, Les Indépendants'', 2 October 1912. It was then reproduced in ''Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques'', a collection of essays by Guillaume Apollinaire published in 1913〔(Guillaume Apollinaire, ''Les Peintres Cubistes" (The Cubist Painters), 1913. Translated with commentary by Peter Reed, 2004 )〕〔Guillaume Apollinaire, ''Méditations Esthétiques. Les Peintres Cubistes'', Paris, 1913〕 The painting was completed around the same time as Albert Gleizes co-authored with Jean Metzinger a major treatise titled ''Du "Cubisme"'' (the first and only manifesto on Cubism). ''Man on a Balcony'' was purchased at the 1913 Armory show by the lawyer, author, art critic, private art collector, and American proponent of Cubism Arthur Jerome Eddy for $540. Gleizes' ''Man on a Balcony'' was the frontispiece of Arthur Jerome Eddy's book ''Cubists and Post-Impressionism'', March 1914.〔(Arthur Jerome Eddy, ''Cubists and Post-Impressionism'', frontispiece, A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1914, second edition 1919 )〕 The painting later formed part of the Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg Collection, 1950. It is currently in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ==Description== ''Man on a Balcony'' is a large oil painting on canvas with dimensions 195.6 x 114.9 cm (77 by 45.25 inches) signed and dated ''Albert Gleizes 12'', lower left. Studies for this work began in the spring of 1912 while the full-figure portrait was probably completed during the late summer of 1912. A study for ''L'Homme au balcon'' was exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants and reproduced in ''Du "Cubisme".〔(Peter Brooke, ''Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century'', New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-300-08964-3 )〕 Gleizes deliberately contrasts angular and curved shapes, while the tubular, block-like forms of the figure and head are derived directly from the principled of Cubism, as laid out in ''Du "Cubisme"''.〔John Golding, ''Cubism: a history and an analysis, 1907-1914'', Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988〕 Daniel Robbins in ''Albert Gleizes 1881–1953, A Retrospective Exhibition'', The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, writes of Gleizes' ''Man on a Balcony'': This second portrait of Dr. Morinaud, probably from his office on Avenue de l'Opera, shows Gleizes again giving prominence to the curvilinear elements that had been important in his style in 1907-09. The painting became the subject of a lively debate between Marinetti and Lhote (La Vie des Lettres et des Arts, no. 16, 1922, p. 10,) in which the Futurist leader insisted that a Futurist painter would have attempted to "give the ensemble of visual sensations capable of being experienced by the person on the balcony". Lhote replied that such preoccupations were "literary" and "psychological", and outside the interests of the French Cubists. He was wrong for, although not primarily concerned with the reality of visual sensations, Gleizes was, nevertheless, deeply committed to symbolic and psychological relationships. (Daniel Robbins, 1964)〔(''Albert Gleizes 1881–1953, a retrospective exhibition'', by Daniel Robbins. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in collaboration with Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, published 1964, no. 32 )〕 The figure of Dr. Théo Morinaud is intentionally still identifiable, unlike the degree of abstraction present within Marcel Duchamp’s ''Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2'', on view in the same gallery at the Armory Show, and unlike ''The Dance at the Spring'' or ''The Procession, Seville'' by Francis Picabia, or Robert Delaunay's, ''Window on the City, No. 4''.〔(The Armory Show at 100, Albert Gleizes, ''Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud)'' )〕 Essentially, the emphasis on simplified form—particularly those that comprise the Dr. Théo Morinaud—does not overwhelm the representational interest of the painting. In this painting the simplification of the representational form gives way to a new complexity in which foreground and background are united, and yet the subject of the painting is not obscured entirely by the network of interlocking geometrical elements. That is not to say that Gleizes sought to make a portrait of the Doctor Morinaud as he actually appeared. Neither in this portrait of Morinaud, ''Portrait of Igor Stravinsky'', 1914 (The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA) or Gleizes' Portrait of Jacques Nayral, nor Picasso's portraits of Vollard, Uhde or Kahnweiler, had the artists sought as a primary goal resemblance with the sitters.〔(Revue de l'art, Issues 43-46, Flammarion, 1979 )〕 In ''Du "Cubisme"'', Gleizes and Metzinger attempted to clarify the distinction between the ''picture'' and ''decorative painting''. And Gleizes, writing in ''The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form'' (first published in 1925), explains the key to the relationship that develops between the artwork and the viewer, between representation or abstraction of from: The plastic results are determined by the technique. As we can see straightaway, it is not a matter of describing, nor is it a matter of abstracting from, anything that is external to itself. There is a concrete act that has to be realised, a reality to be produced - of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognise in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest. Like any natural, physical reality, painting, understood in this way, will touch anyone who knows how to enter into it, not through their opinions on something that exists independently of it, but through its own existence, through those inter-relations, constantly in movement, which enable us to transmit life itself. (Albert Gleizes)〔(Albert Gleizes, ''The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form'', 1925 (Translation by Peter Brooke) )〕 Every artist of the Section d'Or agreed that painting no longer had to be imitative. Gleizes there was no exception. All were in agreement too that the great value of modern art lay in that conception synthesized from experience could be recreated in the mind of the observer. However, there was diversity in defining the constituents of the experience to be synthesized. For Gleizes, then, principles needed to be formulated and derived out of the internal necessity of particular subjects. Important was not just the outward physical aspects or traits of a subject. Gleizes would incorporate 'penetrations', 'recollections' and 'correspondences' (to use his terms) between the subject and the environment. What he knew or felt about the subject became just as fundamental to the outcome of the painting as what he saw in the subject. His conception involved the search for qualities and equivalencies that would relate seemingly disparate phenomena, comparing and identifying one property with another—for example, the elements of the urban background appear as an extension of the pensive Dr. Morinaud. "This is a fundamentally synthetic notion", as pointed out art historian Daniel Robbins, "that points to the unity or compatibility of things. Ironically", he continues, "it is this idea that Kahnweiler was to shape much later as Cubist metaphor in his monograph on Juan Gris".〔Daniel Robbins, ''Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism'', in ''Jean Metzinger in Retrospect'', The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, p. 20〕 After John Quinn, the largest buyer at the Armory Show was Arthur Jerome Eddy. Following his purchase of Gleizes' ''Man on a Balcony'' and of Jacques Villon's ''Jeune femme (Young Girl)'', he returned to the exhibition the following day and bought four more works, including Francis Picabia's ''Danse à la source (Dances at the Spring)'', Marcel Duchamp's ''Le Roi et la Reine entourés de nus vites'', André Derain's ''La forêt (Forest at Martigues)'', and Maurice de Vlaminck's ''Rueil''. Eddy writes of ''Man on a Balcony'' in his ''Cubists and Post-Impressionism'', March 1914: Of all the Cubist pictures exhibited, most people liked "The Man on the Balcony" best. Why? ''Man on a Balcony'', with its monumental architecture of semi-abstract elements, is an open declaration of the principles of Cubist painting. The composition exemplifies the Cubist style of reverberating lines and fractured planes as applied to the traditional format of the full-length portraiture. The treatment of the subject is sufficiently representational to permit the identification of the tall, elegant figure as Dr. Théo Morinaud, a dental surgeon in Paris.〔(Albert Gleizes, l'Homme au Balcon, 1912, oil on canvas, 195.6 x 114.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art )〕 After the completion of both this work and the publication of ''Du "Cubisme"'', Gleizes became convinced that artists could explain themselves as well as or better than critics. He wrote and granted interviews during the following years when ''Du "Cubisme"'' was enjoying wide circulation and considerable success.〔(Daniel Robbins, MoMA, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009 )〕 While still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, ''Man on a Balcony'' demonstrates the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form characteristic of Cubism at the artistic movements peak of 1912. Highly sophisticated both physically and in theory, this aspect of visualizing objects from several successive viewpoints called multiple perspective—different from illusion of motion associated with Futurism—would soon become ubiquitously identified with the practices of the Groupe de Puteaux.〔 The ''Man on a Balcony'' leans nonchalantly against a balustrade occupying the foreground of the composition. At first glance he appears bathed in natural light. But upon close examination there is no clear light source or direction from which the light emanates, giving the overall work the theatrical feeling of a stage set. Aimed at a wide audience, the models monumental three-dimensional presence 'gazes' at the spectator, while the spectator contemplates the painting in return. Just as in Gleizes' ''Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon'' (1911) and Les Baigneuses (The Bathers)'' of the same year, there is present throughout an interplay of perpendicular lines and hyperbolic arcs that produce a rhythm that permeate the complex urban backdrop; here of smokestacks, train tracks, windows, bridge girders and clouds (the view from the balcony of the doctors office on the avenue de l'Opéra).〔〔 "Suggestive of the air, the space, and even the passage of time between these places are bubblelike shapes that emanate from the man to the animated urban panorama behind him. Gleizes's vocabulary becomes more experimental as he captures the cacophony and simultaneity of modern city life using a vocabulary of abbreviated, invented signs. The gray, ocher, beige, and brown colors, often identified with the rigor of Cubist thought, suggest the grimy, smoky city atmosphere, although Gleizes has enlivened this neutral palette by including bright greens and reds as well as creamy white highlights. The large size of the painting contrasts with the intimately scaled Cubist works of Picasso and Braque, reflecting the destination Gleizes envisioned for his work: the public salons of Paris, where he exhibited in the hope of bringing Cubism to wider audiences.〔(Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 33. Albert Gleizes, l'Homme au Balcon, 1912, oil on canvas, 195.6 x 114.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Man on a Balcony」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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