Albert Gleizes

Albert Leon Gleizes was born on 8 December 1881 in Paris, France. He disliked formal schooling and, after completing his secondary education, spent four years, from around 1901 to 1905, in the French army's 72nd Infantry Regiment. It was during this period that he began teaching himself to paint. His father also put him to work in the family's fabric-design studio, practical training in precision and pattern that Gleizes later credited as important to his development as an artist. No records of attendance at an academy, art school, or university have been documented in standard biographical sources; he is consistently described as self-taught.

Gleizes first exhibited in an Impressionist mode at the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. By the early 1910s he had moved toward Cubism, exhibiting in the pivotal 1911 Salon d'Automne in Paris, one of the shows that introduced what became known as Salon Cubism to a wider public. In 1912, with Jean Metzinger, he helped found the Section d'Or group and co-authored Du "Cubisme," and the pair staged a major group show at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris that year. In 1913 his work traveled to the United States as part of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, which introduced modern European art to American audiences in New York, Chicago, and Boston.

Through the 1920s Gleizes exhibited regularly at Leonce Rosenberg's Galerie de l'Effort Moderne in Paris and continued to publish on theory, including Du Cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre (1920) and La Peinture et ses lois (1924). In the 1930s he founded and directed Abstraction-Creation, an international association of non-figurative artists, and he was also associated with the Abbaye de Creteil, an earlier utopian community of artists and writers. In 1937 he was commissioned to paint murals for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, the Paris World's Fair. A major retrospective of his work was held in 1947 at the Chapelle du Lycee Ampere in Lyon. Albert Gleizes died on 23 June 1953 in Avignon, France.

Gleizes is treated in standard art-historical accounts as one of the intellectual architects of Cubism rather than only one of its painters, on the strength of his co-authorship of Du "Cubisme" and his subsequent theoretical writing. His later turn toward Abstraction-Creation in the 1930s is generally read as a continuation of that same interest in codifying the logic of non-figurative painting. That standing has been sustained by his continuing presence in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, among others.

The record price for a work by Albert Gleizes at auction is GBP 1,800,000, roughly USD 2.8 million at the time, paid for the painting Le chemin (Meudon) at Christie's in London in 2010; the exact calendar date of that sale has not been independently confirmed. That price stands well above the typical range for his work at auction, which market-tracking sources put at roughly EUR 25 to just under EUR 2 million, characteristic of a market built on a handful of important paintings rather than deep, consistent liquidity. No current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed; works reach the market primarily through major auction houses and specialist dealers.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Albert Gleizes, so provenance research and expert opinion carry extra weight when evaluating any individual work; buyers should verify sale history directly through the offering auction house or dealer. The market itself is thin and uneven, with a single 2010 result far above the typical range of other sales, so any one auction price should be read in the context of the specific work's date, subject, and condition rather than as a stable benchmark. His deep presence in major museum collections is the strongest signal of long-term art-historical standing, even though that institutional weight has not translated into frequent or high-volume trading at auction.