Landscape with Tree
1910
Imagine looking at a French countryside, but someone shattered the view and reassembled it with a ruler and compass. That’s Albert Gleizes in 1910, right at the birth of Cubism. The giant, forked tree in the foreground looks almost like a piece of machinery or a giant tuning fork, anchoring a landscape of sharp, geometric fields and hatched shadows. Gleizes was a key player in the Section d'Or group, and this drawing shows him stripping nature down to its bare, architectural bones just before the movement went fully abstract.
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