page_title: Man on a Balcony
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Man on a Balcony / Description
context_page_description: Man on a Balcony, is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1912. The Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric art'. Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrates the principles of the movement in this monumental painting with its projecting planes and fragmented lines. The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes's ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences.
  In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of modern art known as Cubism to an American audience at the Armory Show in New York City, Chicago and Boston. In addition to Man on a balcony, Gleizes exhibited his 1910 painting Femme aux Phlox.
  Man on a Balcony was reproduced in L'Excelsior, Au Salon d'Automne, Les Indépendants, 2 October 1912.
context_section_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 
caption: Gustave Caillebotte, c.1880, L'Homme au balcon (Man on a Balcony), oil on canvas, 116 x 97 cm, private collection
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