Man on a Balcony (also known as Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud and 'L'Homme au balcon), is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953).

Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrates the principles of the movement in this monumental painting (over six feet tall) with its projecting planes and fragmented lines.

[2][3] 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.

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.

(Daniel Robbins, 1964)[11]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.

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.

His conception involved the search for qualities and equivalencies that would relate seemingly disparate phenomena, comparing and identifying one property with another—for example, the elements of the urban background appear as an extension of the pensive Dr. Morinaud.

The composition exemplifies the Cubist style of reverberating lines and fractured planes as applied to the traditional format of the full-length portraiture.

The treatment of the subject is sufficiently representational to permit the identification of the tall, elegant figure as Dr. Théo Morinaud, a dental surgeon in Paris.

[16] While still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, Man on a Balcony demonstrates the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form characteristic of Cubism at the artistic movements peak of 1912.

Highly sophisticated both physically and in theory, this aspect of visualizing objects from several successive viewpoints called multiple perspective—different from illusion of motion associated with Futurism—would soon become ubiquitously identified with the practices of the Groupe de Puteaux.

Just as in Gleizes' Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon (1911) and Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) of the same year, there is present throughout an interplay of perpendicular lines and hyperbolic arcs that produce a rhythm that permeate the complex urban backdrop; here of smokestacks, train tracks, windows, bridge girders and clouds (the view from the balcony of the doctors office on the avenue de l'Opéra).

[2][3] "Suggestive of the air, the space, and even the passage of time between these places are bubblelike shapes that emanate from the man to the animated urban panorama behind him.

The gray, ocher, beige, and brown colors, often identified with the rigor of Cubist thought, suggest the grimy, smoky city atmosphere, although Gleizes has enlivened this neutral palette by including bright greens and reds as well as creamy white highlights.

It was Vauxcelles who, on the occasion of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, wrote disparagingly of 'pallid' cubes with reference to the paintings of Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay.

The major contributors were André Mare, a decorative designer, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jacques Villon and Marie Laurencin.

In the house were hung cubist paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger (Woman with a Fan, 1912).

This monumental series of exhibitions showcased the works of the most radical European artists of the time alongside those of their progressive American contemporaries.