Man on a Balcony

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".

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".

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)

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. 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.

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)

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".

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?

Because it looked like a good painting of a man in armour.

"I like the 'Man in Armour,'" was an expression frequently heard.

All of which goes to show that appreciation is largely a matter of association rather than of knowledge and taste.

Tell the people it is not a man in armour, and immediately they ask, in a tone of disgust, "Then what is he?" and the picture they liked a moment before becomes ridiculous in their eyes. (Eddy, 1914)

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.

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. 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.

Salon d'Automne, 1912

The Salon d'Automne of 1912, held in Paris at the Grand Palais from 1 October to 8 November, saw the Cubists (listed below) regrouped into the same room XI. For the occasion, Danseuse au café was reproduced in a photograph published in an article entitled Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" in the French newspaper Excelsior, 2 Octobre 1912. Excelsior was the first publication to privilege photographic illustrations in the treatment of news media; shooting photographs and publishing images in order to tell news stories. As such L'Excelsior was a pioneer of photojournalism.

The history of the Salon d'Automne is marked by two important dates: 1905, bore witness to the birth of Fauvism (with the participation of Metzinger), and 1912, the xenophobe and anti-modernist quarrel (with the participation of both Metzinger and Gleizes). The 1912 polemic leveled against both the French and non-French avant-garde artists originated in Salle XI where the Cubists exhibited their works. The resistance to avant-garde artists and foreigners (dubbed "apaches") was just the visible face of a more profound crises: that of defining modern French art, centered in Paris, and the dwindling of an artistic system crystallized around the heritage of Impressionism. Burgeoning was a new avant-garde system, the international logic of which—mercantile and médiatique—put into question the modern ideology elaborated upon since the late 19th century. What had begun as a question of aesthetics quickly turned political, and as in the 1905 Salon d'Automne, with his infamous "Donatello chez les fauves", the critic Louis Vauxcelles (Les Arts.. 1912) was most implicated in the deliberations. It was Vauxcelles who, on the occasion of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, wrote disparagingly of 'pallid' cubes with reference to the paintings of Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay.

On 3 December 1912 the polemic reached the Chambre des députés and was debated at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.

• Albert Gleizes, exhibited l'Homme au Balcon (Man on a Balcony), (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud) 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), also exhibited at the Armory show, New York, Chicago, Boston, 1913.
• Jean Metzinger entered three works: Dancer in cafe (Danseuse au café), La Plume Jaune (The Yellow Feather), Femme à l'Éventail (Woman with a Fan) (now at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), hung in the decorative arts section inside La Maison Cubiste (the Cubist House).
• Fernand Léger exhibited La Femme en Bleu (Woman in Blue), 1912 (Kunstmuseum, Basel) and Le passage à niveau (The Level Crossing), 1912 (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland)
• Roger de La Fresnaye, Les Baigneuse (The bathers) 1912 (The National Gallery, Washington) and Les joueurs de cartes (Card Players)
• Henri Le Fauconnier, The Huntsman (Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands) and Les Montagnards attaqués par des ours (Mountaineers Attacked by Bears) 1912 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design).
• André Lhote, Le jugement de Paris, 1912 (Private collection)
• František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912 (Narodni Galerie, Prague), and Amorpha Chromatique Chaude.
• Francis Picabia, 1912, La Source (The Spring) (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
• Alexander Archipenko, Family Life, 1912, sculpture
• Amedeo Modigliani, exhibited four elongated and highly stylized heads, sculptures
• Joseph Csaky exhibited the sculptures Groupe de femmes, 1911-1912 (location unknown), Portrait de M.S.H., no. 91 (location unknown), and Danseuse (Femme à l'éventail, Femme à la cruche), no. 405 (location unknown)

This exhibition also featured La Maison cubiste. Raymond Duchamp-Villon designed facade of a 10 meter by 3 meter house, which included a hall, a living room and a bedroom. This installation was placed in the Art Décoratif section of the Salon d'Automne. The major contributors were André Mare, a decorative designer, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jacques Villon and Marie Laurencin. In the house were hung cubist paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger (Woman with a Fan, 1912). Though in the Deco section of the Parisian salon, the installation would soon find its way into the Cubist room at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.

Armory Show

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known today as the Armory Show was a landmark event in the history of art. This monumental series of exhibitions showcased the works of the most radical European artists of the time alongside those of their progressive American contemporaries. This massive exhibition was presented in varying forms at three venues—New York (69th Regiment Armory, February 17–March 15), Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, March 24–April 16), and Boston (Copley Society, April 23–May 14). The exhibition introduced the visual language of European modernism to a wide spectrum of the American public, changing the aesthetic outlook for American artists, collectors, critics, galleries and museums.

In 1913, Archipenko, Gleizes, Picabia, Picasso, the Duchamp brothers and others introduced Cubism to an American audience at the Armory Show in three major cities, New York City, Chicago and Boston. In addition to Man on a balcony (no. 196), Gleizes exhibited his 1910 painting (no. 195 of the catalogue) Femme aux Phlox (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), an example of early Cubism.