The School Boy (L'écolier)

 

Albert Gleizes

  1881 - 1953 (biography)

1946 published in 'Du Cubisme', 1947. 

drypoint, printed in bistre/red-brown ink. 

7 x 5 1/8" platemark. 

in plate, lower left image 

20 proofs were pulled in bistre/red-brown ink, and a published edition totaling 455 impressions in b 

dated "46" in the plate, lower left 

Loyer 4; "Du Cubisme" 8; "The Cubist Print 140h; Stein 47; 

cream wove Lana paper 

iii/iii, published 

Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger with Compagnie Francaise des Arts Graphiques, Paris. 

22968 

$1,500.00 

Exploring the potential of drypoint, this print by French Cubist Albert Gleizes exemplifies the early 20th century revolutionary genre as translated onto the plate. With a discernable figure at the center, the composition is broken up into flattened picture planes, delineated by different lines – vertical, diagonal, crosshatched, curved – to ground the image. By leaving some areas of the plate untouched and others highly worked, the result is both pictorial and textural. Gleizes is one of history's most influential and ardently devoted Cubist artists and theorists, going so far as to create a set of "laws" dictating the principles of planar imagery, based on rhythm and movement. Though the popularity of Cubism declined with the onset of World War I in favor of social realism and Abstraction, Gleizes continued to focus on the style that spoke to him, and int he late 1940s a renewed interest in the mathematical aspects of his theories lent to a revival of interest in his work. He died in Avginon in 1953. Learn more about him in our biography, above.