The interest of the painting resides in its rich and complex fabric of interwoven latticework, with 'the institution of relations between straight lines and curves' or the 'thousand surprises of fire and of shadow' proposed in Du "Cubisme" (co-authored with Jean Metzinger in 1912).

It is a mark of the failure of the Cubist revolution – its hi-jacking by the champions of the subject – that nearly one hundred years later there are writers on art who can see in such a picture only peasants, a church tower, a rustic meal, mountains, clouds..."[2] In this painting can be observed the summing up of all present in the art of Georges Seurat: "the line, independent of its topographical role, possesses an assessable abstract value", it represented the furthest extension of Paul Cézanne's preoccupations: his will to deconstruct, his revolt against imitation and refusal of Renaissance perspective.

[4] Much as that of Les Baigneuses and Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud) painted the same year, the subject matter of Harvest Threshing—a semi-urban landscape that possesses both rural and semi-industrial components, juxtaposing sharply contrasting elements of both traditional and modern life—is derived from an unsentimental observation of the world.

It was treated neither as a "confined symbolic allegory nor as a cultural background indicated by specific real appearance, but was instead presented in concrete and precise terms.

At the same time, iconography explains how Gleizes and Delaunay were to become abstract painters, theoretically closer to Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian than to Picasso, Braque or even Gris.

As a consequence, almost a year after the completion of The Harvesters, Gleizes would develop compositional innovations: broad tilting planes that provide a transition from the outer rectangles to the rotating forms at the core of the work.

By placing the artist at the centre of society, Albert Gleizes, along with a generation of painters from diverse classes and nations, helped revolutionize the bourgeois canons.

[3] Shortly after the 1912 publication of Du "Cubisme", Guillaume Apollinaire published Les Peintres Cubiste (1913, written in 1912), in which he wrote "Majesty: this is what, above all, characterizes the art of Albert Gleizes.

"[5] At the outset of 1938, Gleizes learned that the religious community that owned Moly Sabata, a large house he had rented in Sablons, was ready to sell.

In August, however, the American collector, Solomon R. Guggenheim purchased a large number of paintings directly from Gleizes, including his pre-war Cubist masterpiece, Le Dépiquage des Moissons; a work he hoped would have been taken by a museum in France.