Abbaye de Créteil

[1][2] In 1905 and early 1906 a group of young artists and poets holding meetings at various locations found that society, the way it was organized, did not take into consideration an environment needed for creative expression, nor the goals it proposed.

In an unpublished part of his Souvenirs Gleizes wrote that an initial idea for the Abbaye of Créteil was to escape from corrupt Western civilization to the simplicity of life in the South Seas, as he then believed Gauguin had done.

The art historian Daniel Robbins is responsible for laying out the filiation between the Paul Fort's Vers et Prose, the Abbaye, post-Symbolist writers and politically engaged aesthetic thinking that would lead Gleizes to Cubism.

[5] In his 1964 Guggenheim essay on Gleizes, Robbins developed these notions and summarized them as: A synthetic view of the universe, presenting the remarkable phenomena of time and space, multiplicity and diversity, at once was his painted equivalent to the ideals which were verbally realized in the Abbaye poetry.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Constantin Brâncuși were visitors there and young writers like Roger Allard (one of the first to defend Cubism), Pierre Jean Jouve, and Paul Castiaux are some of the artists who wanted to publish their works through the Abbaye.

[1][6] Shortly after its dissolution, Gleizes moved to 7 rue du Delta near Montmartre, Paris, with artists Henri Doucet [fr], Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Drouart and Geo Printemps.