Description
Albert Gleizes was at the forefront Cubism in Paris in the 1910s, organising the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, the first presentation of cubism. A painter and theorist, alongside fellow artist Jean Metzinger he wrote numerous essays on the movement, compiling them in the book ‘Cubisme’ of 1912.

Whilst still working within the framework of Cubism, this work shows Gleizes adopting an increasingly abstract style. During a trip to Spain in 1916 with Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia and his wife Juliette Roche, Gleizes significantly met with Robert Delaunay. The discs seen in ‘Creation’ clearly derived from that meeting and the dark colours of his Cubist palette have been replaced with vivid oranges.

In 1934 Gleizes returned to many of his earlier canvases, predominantly from 1923 and 1924, adding grey arabesques. Gleizes described the rational of this as “my compositions remained fragmented, and despite some of my intuitions that made me adopt a colourful curvature around the central theme, I felt that unity had not been achieved”. Having studied chromatics and the rainbow in depth, he used grey as “a mixture of white and black, giving me a grey of a certain intensity which corresponded to the general tonality of the canvas that lay before me. And, using this tone by itself, I placed on top of the coloured composition, an arabesque, the simplest I could, which, in a single line, expressed all the intentions that had been implicit in the comings and goings I had evoked in the painting”.

‘Creation’ was previously in the collection of the trail blazing gallerist Gail Feingarten Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the director of Feingarten Galleries alongside her husband Charles Feingarten, specialising in masterpieces from classicism to modernism. The connection between art and spirituality was of great importance for Oppenheimer, and as such had a clear affinity towards Gleizes creative process.