Albert Gleizes

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"Gleizes" redirects here. For the French writer, see Jean-Antoine Gleizes.

Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes, circa 1920
Birth name	Albert Léon Gleizes
Born	December 8, 1881 Paris
Died	June 23, 1953 (aged 71) Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Nationality	French
Field	painting, writing
Movement	Cubism, Abstract art, Abstraction-Création

Albert Gleizes (8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953), was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Creteil.^[1] Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing (e.g., La Peinture et ses lois (Paris, 1923), Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris, 1932) and Homocentrisme (Sablons, 1937).^[2]

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Cubism
  • 2.1 The crucial years
  • 2.2 Theory
  • 2.3 1913–1918
• 3 Post-Cubism
• 4 Legacy
• 5 Commemoration
• 6 Gallery
• 7 Writings
  • 7.1 Books
  • 7.2 Articles
• 8 References and sources
• 9 External links

Early life

Albert Gleizes, 1909, Bords de la Marne, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Albert Gleizes, 1910, La Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox)), oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, exhibited Armory Show, New York, 1913, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. He was also the nephew of Léon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery. Finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army (Abbeville, Picardie) then began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition. His first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear particularly inspired by Sisley or Pissarro.^[3] Although clearly related to Pissarro in technique, Gleizes' particular view-points as well as the composition and conception of early works represent a clear departure from the style of late Impressionism. The density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were often noted by early critics.^[1]
Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of l'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1906), Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components.^[3]

Agnes Denes

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Agnes Denes
Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland
Born	1931 (age 81–82) Budapest, Hungary
Nationality	American
Training	New School, Columbia University
Movement	Conceptual Art
Works	Visual Philosophy, Wheatfield, Tree Mountain
Website	http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/

Agnes Denes (Dénes Ágnes; Budapest, 1931) is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of mediums - from poetry and philosophy writings, to complex hand and computer rendered diagrams (which she terms Visual Philosophy), sculpture, and international environmental installations, such as Wheatfield -- A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan.^[1]

Contents

• 1 Biography and Early Career
• 2 Selected works
  • 2.1 Ecological
  • 2.2 Visual Philosophy
  • 2.3 Sculpture
  • 2.4 Writing
• 3 Retrospective Cataloges
• 4 Public Collections
• 5 Awards
• 6 External links
• 7 References

Biography and Early Career

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931,^[2] her family survived the Nazi occupation and moved to Sweden in the mid-1940s. As a teenager, they relocated again to the United States. She has said that the repeated change in language caused her to focus on the visual arts - having "suddenly been silenced."^[3] She studied painting at the New School and Columbia University in New York, and exhibited and sold some of her work.^[3] She soon abandoned painting, due to the constraints of the canvas, and focused broadly on ideas she could explore in other mediums.^[1] "I found its vocabulary limiting"^[3]
She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world, and has written 6 books.^[4] At some point in the late 1960s-1970s, she was married and has one son, Robert T. Frankel.^[5]

Selected works

What ties it all together is Ms. Denes’s insistence on marrying ambitious intellectual ideas with exquisite formal execution. In contrast to many of her conceptual and land-art peers, she has always been deeply involved with drawing. - Carol Kino, New York Times.^[1]

Ecological

In the history of art there have been a few artists’ artists—individuals who have emphasized in their work the raising of provocative questions and who have also tested the limits of art by taking it into new, unforeseen areas and by using it for distinctly new functions. Agnes Denes is one of these special artists. -Art historian Robert Hobbs, 1992^[6]

• Rice/Tree/Burial 1968, Eco-Logic, Sullivan County, New York; re-created 1977 at Artpark ^[7]

As a pioneer of Land Art, Agnes Denes created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York. Acknowledged as the first site-specific performance piece with ecological concerns,^[1] it was enacted ten years later on an expanded scale at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. This performance piece involved planting rice seeds in a field in upstate New York, chaining surrounding trees and burying a time capsule filled with copies of her haiku. “It was about communication with the earth,” Ms. Denes said, “and communicating with the future.”"^[1][8]

• Wheatfield, a Confrontation 1982 Manhattan, Battery Park City landfill ^{[9][10][11][12]}

Arguably her best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).

• Tree Mountain-a living time capsule 1996, Ylöjärvi, Finland^[13][14][15]

A monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Western Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years.

• A Forest for Australia reforestation of Red Gum, She Oak, and Paperbark trees in Melbourne Australia 1998 ^[16][17][18]

6000 trees of an endangered species with varying heights at maturity were planted into five spirals by the artist, creating a step pyramid for each spiral when the trees are fullgrown. The trees help alleviate serious land erosion and desertification threatening Australia.

• Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie Master Plan, 2000

A 25 year master plan to unite a 100 kilometer-long string of forts dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Incorporating water and flood management, urban planning, historical preservation, landscaping, and tourism into a single plan.

• North Waterfront Park Masterplan, Berkeley, California, 1988-91. Site plan and art concept.^[19]

A conceptual masterplan was developed for the conversion of a 97-acre municipal landfill, surrounded by water on three sides in the San Francisco Bay, into an oasis for people and nature.

Visual Philosophy

Ms. Denes as a highly original thinker and visualizer whose work rewards the close attention it demands. -Grace Glueck, New York Times.^[20]

• 

Agnes Denes drawings in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution Museums
Beginning in 1968, she began an intensive exploration of philosophy through art. The result was "an amazing body of work, distinguished by its intellectual rigor, aesthetic beauty, conceptual analysis, and environmental concern." -Jill Hartz, retrospective editor, Cornell University^[5]

• Paradox and Essence (Philosophical Drawings), 1976, Published by Tau/ma Press, Rome, Italy, in English and Italian. Edition of 200; 60 pages^[21]
• Sculptures of the Mind, 1976, Published by the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio. Edition of 1,000, 250 signed and numbered; 50 pages^[22]
• Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections (from the Study of Distortions Series, 1973-1979), 1979. Published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, New York. Edition of 200 hardback copies in silver foil, signed and numbered by the artist; edition of 600 in paperback; 100 pages, color and black and white throughout, 29 original drawings specially created for the book, 22 transparent pages.^[23]

• 
• 
• 

Original drawings for Isometric Systems, from the Museum of Modern Art Collection

• Early Philosophical Drawings, Monoprints, and Sculpture 1970-1973^[24]

Sculpture

A gallery exhibition can only suggest how far and wide the polymathic Ms. Denes has ranged over material and mental worlds during the past four decades. It would take a full-scale museum retrospective to do that. -Ken Johnson, New York Times 2012^[25]

• Sculptures of the Mind 1968-2012 [1]^[25] See gallery website for 10 images of pieces in the exhibit.

Writing

• See three titles under Visual Philosophy, above.
• Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter 1989 Published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, New York. Edition of 1,100 of which 200 are signed with an original artwork. Insert ("The Debate - 1 Million B.C. - 1 Million A.D.); 200 pages, 16 full-page duotones [2]
• The Human Argument, 2008 Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut.^[26]
• Poetry Walk—Reflections: Pools of Thought, 2000 Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Art Museum.[3]

Retrospective Cataloges

• Agnes Denes: Perspectives, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1974 [4]
• Agnes Denes: Sculptures of the Mind / Philosophical Drawings by Amerika Haus Berlin, 1978^[27]
• Agnes Denes 1968 -1980, Gary Garrels curator, Hayden Gallery, MIT, Boston, 1980^[28]
• Agnes Denes: Concept into Form, Works : 1970-1990, Arts Club of Chicago, 1990^[29]
• Agnes Denes by Jill Hartz, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992 [5]
• The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes: An Exhibition of 85 Works, Gibson Gallery, 1996 [6]
• Project for Public Spaces, a Retrospective, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA; 2003^[30]

Public Collections

• The Museum of Modern Art, has 14 pieces in the permanent collection.^[31]
• The Metropolitan Museum has 5 pieces in the permanent collection.^[32]
• The Whitney Museum of American Art has 3 pieces in the permanent collection.^[33]
• An additional 43 public museums include pieces in their permanent collections^[34]

She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Awards

Four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; Four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; The DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990);^[35] Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998);^[36] Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999);^[37] Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007);^[38] Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary.

External links

• YouTube Video: Agnes Denes at the Creative Time Summit 2010 [7]
• YouTube Video: Radical Nature - Environmental Activism, at Barbican Centre, London Interview of Denes, images of Wheatfield [8]
• YouTube Video: Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers - Exhibition at SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY. [9]
• Agnes Denes at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects Representative Gallery for Agnes Denes
• Agnes Denes: Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now, Exhibition Site at Leslie Tonkonow Gallery Nov 15, 2012 - Jan 19, 2013

Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt

American,( 1913–1967)

- About this artist

Source: Oxford University Press

American painter and writer. He was renowned for his work as an abstract painter and for his influence on Minimalism; he also wrote and lectured throughout his life, using these forms to deal with matters he felt were best left out of painting. He set his date of birth in the context of a personal, cultural and political chronology, describing it as having taken place nine months after the Armory Show had ended, on the eve of Europe’s entry into World War I and during the year in which Kazimir Malevich painted the first geometric abstract painting. Extensive travel throughout the world fed his encyclopedic interests.

Reinhardt studied (1931–5) literature and then art history under Meyer Schapiro (b 1904) at Columbia University, New York, where he gained a broad-based arts education; also under Schapiro’s influence he became involved in what were then considered radical campus politics. Reinhardt was editor of the humorous campus publication Jester, for which he created covers in a flattened Cubist style.

Reinhardt’s decision to be an artist was strengthened by his years at Columbia, but his practical training as a painter came primarily after graduation, first at the National Academy of Design and, from 1936 to 1937, at the American Artists’ School on 14th Street. There he was affected by the alternatives proposed by the painters who ran the school, Francis Criss (b 1901) and Carl Holty (1900–73), to the then dominant Social Realism: Criss favoured asymmetrical geometry in his urban landscapes; Holty flattened and divided figures and objects into complex and broad shapes of solid colour. Reinhardt became a member in 1937 of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), of which Holty was chairman; Reinhardt also became affiliated to the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress, through both of which he met Stuart Davis, who became a great inspiration to him. Reinhardt thus allied himself with the forward-thinking American artistic–political groups of the late 1930s.

From 1936 to 1941 Reinhardt was among the relatively few abstract artists employed in the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). His numerous paintings that resulted consisted of collage-based, solid-toned, linear, interlocking, geometric forms, such as Abstract Painting (1940; priv. col., see Lippard, 1981, pl. 20) in which his circular and rectilinear shapes were composed as variations on small, cut-paper collages. Reinhardt seemed to have reached immediate artistic maturity. During the early 1940s his original Cubist-derived geometry grew in complexity, as organic and gestural markings gradually replaced precise, hard-edged forms. Though the foundation of his art was collage, as the decade progressed his paintings and drawings were characterized by an embellished linear activity comparable to the incipient Abstract Expressionism of some of his colleagues, as in Number 18 (1949; New York, Whitney). Reinhardt’s work was included in The Ideographic Picture, the group exhibition organized in 1947 by Barnett Newman at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York; among others taking part were Newman himself, Hans Hofmann and Theodoros Stamos. Apart from a year’s interruption for military service from 1944 to 1945, throughout the 1940s Reinhardt’s art focused progressively on a gestural and linear abstraction related to Abstract Expressionism.

When Reinhardt’s funding from the WPA/FAP came to an end in 1941 he began a period of commercial and industrial jobs and freelance graphic work. He was associated with the vanguard PM newspaper as an artist–reporter from 1942 to 1947, producing memorably incisive cartoons. His earliest solo shows occurred in 1943 and 1944 and recognition quickly followed. In 1944 his work was first acquired by a public collection, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art (this collection was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1946). Reinhardt joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946, where he remained throughout his life. In 1947 he took up a post at Brooklyn College, teaching art history.

There are definite links between Reinhardt’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Reinhardt’s abhorrence, however, of the biomorphism, emotionalism and cult of individuality favoured by the Abstract Expressionists led him to produce geometric paintings dominated by grid structures and by variations of a single colour, for example Red Painting (1952; New York, Met.) and Black painting (1952–3; see Colour interaction, colour pl. VIIId), signalling a break with them. Curved forms were eliminated in favour of horizontal and vertical brick-like strokes of paint. Ragged, sinuous edges were purged. His new perception of the work of Piet Mondrian and his personal contact with Josef Albers, with whom he taught in the Yale University Art Department from 1952 to 1953, were catalysts for this return to the geometric. The solid symmetrical blocks of colours characteristic of his late paintings appeared by 1952. These rectilinearly and then squarely structured monochrome paintings were first painted in shades of blue or red and culminated in Reinhardt’s final black series, for example Abstract Painting, Black (1960–66; London, Tate). With these ‘ultimate’ paintings, Reinhardt merged his art and his aesthetics, concentrating the viewer’s attention on gradations of colour of such subtlety that they were nearly impossible to see. Reinhardt’s early identification with the New York School was challenged by his more potent role as the precursor of Minimalism and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. His reductive paintings, buttressed by some of his most complex prose, insisted on the primacy of direct observation unattended by literary or naturalistic association. These dark and seemingly invisible works were composed in nine-part, Greek cross blocks. Reinhardt pursued this form exclusively until his death.

Patterson Sims