Les Baigneuses, while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form and multiple perspective characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1912.

[3] Les Baigneuses is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 105 x 171 cm (41.3 by 67.3 inches), signed Albert Gleizes and dated 1912, lower left.

This work, painted at the outset of 1912, represents a series of naked elegant women at various points in the landscape foreground, their reflections along with the blue of the sky echoing off the water at the lower edge of the canvas.

Though native to many areas of the Northern Hemisphere, the Poplar, with its fastigiate branches tapered towards the top, is especially iconic of the western suburbs of Paris (la banlieue ouest) where Gleizes lived, 24 Avenue Gambetta, Courbevoie.

On the one hand the artist includes elements from a society in the process of inexorable industrialization, and on the other, the sereneness of timeless classical nude figures (something rarely painted by Gleizes, as Brooke points out).

[6] The background forms a semi-urban landscape that possesses both rural and semi-industrial components, consistent with Courbevoie of the 1910s (except perhaps for the rock-like outcrops), a village or town with delicate smokestacks or factory chimneys billowing smoke that blends into the cloudy sky.

Gleizes painted L'île de la Jatte many times since 1901 and on at least five occasions between 1907 and 1912: The subject matter of Les Baigneuses, much as that of his monumental Harvest Threshing of the same year, is derived from an unsentimental observation of the world.

While the subject was "explicit in its reference to latinist classicism" writes Cottington, "and implicit in its rejection of the avant-gardist challenge of the futurists to avoid the pictorial representation of the nude as inescapably passé", he continues, "the presence of emblems of industrialization, not juxtaposed but integrated with the rhythms of the landscape, marked a definite, if tentative, departure from the concerns he had shared with Le Fauconnier.

"[2] Gleizes made use of fragmentation of form, multiple perspective views (i.e., mobile and dynamic, rather than static and from one point-of-view) along with linear and planar structural qualities.

[2] For Gleizes and those of his entourage 1912 signified a climax in the debates centering around modernism and classicism – Bergson and Nietzsche – Euclid and Riemann – nationalism and regionalism – Poincaré and four-dimensional space.

[9] It was both as artists and theorists (in painting and writing) that Gleizes and Metzinger expressed their critical and ideological discourse about the possible meanings and significance of Cubism and contemporary aesthetics.

It was natural that Gleizes and Metzinger, both articulate men, should come not just to theorize on the meaning of Cubism, but to defend the movement against attacks leveled in the wake of the 1911 public exhibitions.

[sic][12][13] The preoccupations of Gleizes, to considerable extent beyond those emancipated by Cézanne, was to play with the mobile, dynamic, changing aspects of the same form relative to the position of the painter.

[11] Les Baigneuses, along with other compositions by Gleizes and his fellow Salon Cubists from this period (1911-1912), tend to coordinate a variety of views of the same subject, or a multiplicity (in the Bergsonian sense) of different angles in one picture.

The liberation from academicism offered by Cubism, as instigated by Cézanne, resulted from the fact that the artist was no longer restricted to the representation of the subject (or the world) as seen in a photograph.

[11] In 1912 the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey particularly interested artists of the Section d'Or, including Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes.

A predecessor to cinematography and moving film, chronophotography involved a series or succession of different images, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement.

1347) — Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant l'escalier was listed in the catalogue (n. 1001)[19] but was supposedly withdrawn — Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited Artillerie (no.

From which it became clear that these paintings—and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself—appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.