[1][2][3] The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul.

At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.

These wartime works mark "the beginning of an attempt to preserve specific and individual visual characteristics while experimenting with a radically different compositional treatment in which broad planes, angled from the perimeter, meet circles."

[5] Portrait of an Army Doctor—earlier forming part of the collection of art dealer Léonce Rosenberg[6]—was purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim at an important Gleizes exhibition at René Gimpel Galerie in New York City, December 1936 to January 1937 (no.

[6] Gleizes's works from this period, just as those of the early 1920s, are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern.

"[3] Gleizes brings into practice an effect reminiscent of Divisionist theory via the incorporation of colored squares within three sections of the canvas, one of which is composed of alternating pigments of contrasting blues and reds.

In 1915 Gleizes published an article in Jean Cocteau's patriotic review, Le Mot in which he attacks critics who accuse the new tendencies in art of being unpatriotic.

[5] The canvas is no longer analyzed or structured geometrically according to the golden ratio, though the armrest of the chair is treated as the beginning of a Fibonacci spiral.

"[15] Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time.

The eye is required to enter into that collaboration which is necessary if it wishes to emerge from the torpor to which it had been reduced at the insistence of the single point perspective of the Renaissance; painting makes a legitimate claim to be regarded as an art of time ...

(Gleizes, 1927)[15]While depth perception and perspective have been subdued to a large extent, the primary structural lines appear to recede or converge toward a multitude of vanishing points located at infinity.

Though, unlike those of classical perspective, these vanishing points are not placed on a given horizon (a theoretical line that represents the eye level of the observer), nor do they allow the viewer to reconstruct the relative distance of parts or features of an object.

By removing these optical cues, the geometrical method of perspective used to create the illusion of form, space and depth since the Renaissance, the artifice of an illusionistic trickery as Metzinger called it,[17] Gleizes's aim was to arrive at what he perceived as 'truth', the constructive essence of the physical world.

A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system..." (Gleizes, c.1916, letter addressed to Henri-Martin Barzun [fr])[5]From 1914 to the end of Gleizes's New York period—however nonrepresentational—works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism.

"[2] Many of the leading Cubists were mobilized at the outset of the First World War: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Duchamp-Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger,[19] yet despite the radical interruption, they were able to continue producing styles of Cubism that extended beyond pre-war attitudes.

[25] Unlike the "Impressionism of form" and dissection of the subject by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Gleizes attempted to create a synthetic art that incorporated social values.

[5] His experience with artistic and literary activities at the Abbey of Créteil and the Association Ernest Renan, along with his connection to the distinguished author and actor Maxime Léry, may have helped secure the post.

[5] Gleizes activities as artistic and literary impresario at the fortress included monologues reciting classical, romantic and Symbolist poetry by Paul Fort, Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

[5] Gleizes' mobilization was an obstacle to his production of artwork, though he was able to work on small scale, and ultimately produced one relatively large piece, Portrait of an Army Doctor.

[5] The painter Gleizes, who wrote a book on Cubism, writes to a friend: "From Toul, advanced outpost on the Eastern border, I am sending you this card.

Portrait of an Army Doctor consists of broad, overlapping planes of brilliant color, dynamically intersecting vertical, diagonal, horizontal lines coupled with circular movements.

[19] Basing himself on his 1915 abstractions, Gleizes sought to clarify his methods further in La Peinture et ses lois, deducing the fundamental principles of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the universal physical laws.

These theoretical postulates, later referred to as translation-rotation, according to Robbins, rank "with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms".

He kept the landscapes and portrait sketches in a drawer, until one day they were discover by a private (a miner) who removed them all only to tack them on the wall with toothpicks for an exhibition.

With all it had to offer, New York had a strong impact on the artist's production, leading to abstract works virtually free of visual subject matter.

[38] The motivation for the Pompidou exhibition resides in broadening the scope of Cubism, usually focused on Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, to include the major contributions of the Salon Cubists, the Section d'Or, and others who participated in the over-all movement.