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''Portrait of an Army Doctor'' (in French ''Portrait d'un médecin militaire'') is a 1914-15 painting by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the paintings abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism.〔(J. Fiona Ragheb, ''Albert Gleizes, Portrait of an Army Doctor'', Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Collection Online )〕〔(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. )〕〔(Daniel Robbins, ''Albert Gleizes'', Grove Art Online, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Oxford University Press, 2009 )〕 The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870-1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though ''Portrait of an Army Doctor'' is one of the only major oil paintings of the period.〔(Peter Brooke, ''Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1915'', from ''Le Cubisme en majesté, Albert Gleizes'', exhibition catalogue, Musée Picasso, Barcelona; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 2001 )〕 As other wartime works by Gleizes, ''Portrait of an Army Doctor'' represents a break from the first phase of Cubism. These wartime works mark "the beginning of an attempt to preserve specific and individual visual characteristics while experimenting with a radically different compositional treatment in which broad planes, angled from the perimeter, meet circles." (Robbins, 1964)〔 Rather than based on the ''analysis'' of volumetric objects, the artist strove toward ''synthesis''; something that originated in ''unity''.〔(Peter Brooke, ''Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century'', Yale University Press, 2001 ), ISBN 0300089643〕 ''Portrait of an Army Doctor''—earlier forming part of the collection of art dealer Léonce Rosenberg〔(Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), ''La peinture moderne'', Éditions G. Crès et Cie, 1925 )〕—was purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim at an important Gleizes exhibition at René Gimpel Galerie in New York City, December 1936 to January 1937 (no. 8).〔 The work forms part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection.〔(Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection )〕 It was gifted to the museum by Solomon Guggenheim in 1937 (the year of the formation of the foundation). The painting is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.〔 ==Description== ''Portrait of an Army Doctor'' is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 119.8 x 95.1 cm (47.25 x 37.44 inches) inscribed ''Alb. Gleizes, Toul 1914'', lower right. An early photograph of the work shows the inscribed date as 1914-15.〔 Gleizes's works from this period, just as those of the early 1920s, are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern."〔 Gleizes brings into practice an effect reminiscent of Divisionist theory via the incorporation of colored squares within three sections of the canvas, one of which is composed of alternating pigments of contrasting blues and reds. The use of blue, white and red in the overall composition recall the colors of the French flag. Such a display of patriotism was not uncommon among the Cubists, even leading up to the war. French flags can be seen in the works of Roger de La Fresnaye; ''Fourteenth of July'', 1913-14 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX),〔(Roger de La Fresnaye, ''Fourteenth of July'', 1913-14 )〕 and ''The Conquest of the Air'', 1913 (Museum of Modern Art, New York).〔(Roger de La Fresnaye, ''The Conquest of the Air'', 1913, 235.9 x 195.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York )〕〔(Échos artistiques de la conquête de l’air : Roger de la Fresnay et la modernité )〕〔(Eric Hild-Ziem, MoMA, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009 )〕 The Cubo-Futurist Gino Severini, too, included the French flag in his 1913 painting ''Train of the Wounded'', 1913.〔(Gino Severini, ''Train of the Wounded'', 1913, includes the French flag )〕 While not depicting the flag itself, wartime works by Jean Metzinger dominantly exhibit blues and reds, along with army green, in such works as ''Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess)'', 1914-15, Smart Museum of Art, and ''Femme au miroir (Lady at her Dressing Table)'', April 1916. In 1915 Gleizes published an article in Jean Cocteau's patriotic review, ''Le Mot'' in which he attacks critics who accuse the new tendencies in art of being unpatriotic. The final issue of ''Le Mot'' includes a sketch by Gleizes based on wounded soldiers returning from a battle at Bois le Prêtre.〔〔(''C’est en allant se jeter à la mer que le fleuve reste fidèle à sa source'', Le Mot, Paris, vol. I, no. 17, 1 Mai 1915 )〕〔(Le Mot, n. 20, 1 July 1915, in Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France )〕 Despite its descriptive title, the subject matter of ''Portrait of an Army Doctor'' has practically disappeared.〔 The canvas is no longer analyzed or structured geometrically according to the golden ratio, though the armrest of the chair is treated as the beginning of a Fibonacci spiral. The masses of the composition are arranged in quasi-equilibrium. The center of the sitter face is the superior vertex of a triangular construct that extends toward the outer edges of the canvas. The intersection of the two arcs that compose the shoulders is centered on the vertical axis. The source of light is undetermined, or omnidirectional, just as the vantage point of the artist, in accord with the Cubist principle of 'simultaneity' (or multiple perspective): "a succession of descriptive aspects of the external world... by giving a multiple series of appearances, each one seen in its own perspective", writes Gleizes, "a succession of descriptive states. Waking up, this eye lurched from one point of view to the other, jumped back again, and was again thrown into a state of excitement."〔(Albert Gleizes, ''Painting and Representational Perspective'', Lecture dated Paris, 22 March 1927, given in the Carnegie Foundation for the French Intellectual Union and published by Éditions Moly Sabata 1927 ). Republished in ''Puissances du Cubisme'', Eds Présence, Chambery, 1969. Translation Peter Brooke〕 Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself".〔 Multiple perspective was in itself a protest against painting defined as an art based on space, that is to say, static. An aspiration towards mobility begins to appear and to appeal to the eye. The eye is required to enter into that collaboration which is necessary if it wishes to emerge from the torpor to which it had been reduced at the insistence of the single point perspective of the Renaissance; painting makes a legitimate claim to be regarded as an art of time... Breaking up the plane into surfaces of different sizes reduced to geometrical forms. Sometimes certain indications of figures appear in this assemblage, obtained with the help of a few lines and several suggestive points. (Gleizes, 1927)〔 While depth perception and perspective have been subdued to a large extent, the primary structural lines appear to recede or converge toward a multitude of vanishing points located at infinity. Though, unlike those of classical perspective, these vanishing points are not placed on a given horizon (a theoretical line that represents the eye level of the observer), nor do they allow the viewer to reconstruct the relative distance of parts or features of an object. Rather, they are placed on various horizons. The viewer is observing a non-linear scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's multiple axes, giving the appearance of different forms of calculated perspective. Surfaces appear to overlap creating a sense of occlusion, but the resulting information is insufficient to allow the observer to recreate depth of field. By removing these optical cues, the geometrical method of perspective used to create the illusion of form, space and depth since the Renaissance, ''the artifice of an illusionistic trickery'' as Metzinger called it,〔Jean Metzinger, ''Le Cubisme était Né: Souvenirs par Jean Metzinger'' (Cubism was Born), Présence, Chambéry, 1972. (This text written by Jean Metzinger was supplied to the publisher Henri Viaud by Metzinger's widow Suzanne Phocas). Translation Peter Brooke〕 Gleizes's aim was to arrive at what he perceived as 'truth', the constructive essence of the physical world.〔 So, now that we are in possession of the means (and I firmly believe that we are) we must pitilessly reject the image of the Renaissance that is addressed exclusively to the senses, but, at the same time, we should not fear, should the occasion present itself, an image determined by geometry, by the square, the right angle, because it, in its nature, corresponds to the higher stages. The Renaissance image, I repeat, bears no, or too little, relation to them; the new image will give more meaning and variety to the space. (Gleizes)〔(Albert Gleizes, A Letter to Anne Dangar, ''Space, time, eternity''. In Albert Gleizes in 1934, translation by Peter Brooke )〕 We are in the age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, actions, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallised the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilized in his picture. The painting of today must crystallise a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system..." (Gleizes, c.1916, letter addressed to )〔 From 1914 to the end of Gleizes's New York period—however nonrepresentational—works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism.〔 Gleizes's nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."〔 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「Portrait of an Army Doctor」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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