CUBISM STUDY (AI, 2026)
DELAUNAY — THE TOWER
Between 1909 and 1912, Robert Delaunay returned again and again to the same subject — the new iron tower that had risen over Paris twenty years earlier. He painted it from the windows of his studio, from the streets below, from the rooftops opposite, and from inside his own head. The tower became his laboratory for what Cubism could become: not the still life of Picasso and Braque, but a fractured architecture of light, color, and the modern city’s vertical thrust. The three works gathered here trace his early Cubist treatment — seen from above among the rooftops, isolated against the sky, and dissolving into the city that surrounds it.
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AMONG THE BUILDINGS
CITY
Viewed from a narrow alleyway, the tower no longer dominates the scene. Delaunay painted these embedded views to show how modernity and the old town are interwoven.
ABOVE THE CITY
ROOFTOPS
Seen from a high window or balcony, the Paris rooftops cascade down toward the distant Tower. The buildings break into fractured warm planes — chimneys, slate roofs, dormers, courtyard walls — all assembled into a single faceted descent. The Tower stands at the horizon line as the picture’s vanishing point and its center of gravity at once.
CUBISM STUDY (AI, 2026)
GLEIZES — THE WORKING FIGURE
Albert Gleizes was Cubism’s first theorist — co-author with Jean Metzinger of Du Cubisme (1912), the first book that tried to explain the new movement to the public. But what makes his paintings memorable is not the theory; it is the way he applied Cubist fragmentation to the human figure. Where Picasso and Braque dissolved their figures into atmospheric grids, Gleizes kept the body coherent and monumental, breaking it into interlocking warm planes that suggested both modern industry and Renaissance solidity. The three works gathered here trace that range: a group of figures around a midday meal, a single seated thinker in profile and a single standing harvester in a wheat field.
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IN THE FIELD
HARVESTER
Gleizes loved rural subjects throughout his career — the harvester at the edge of a wheat field, the body monumentalized by Cubist geometry. The figure stands in the foreground, scythe over shoulder, the field behind broken into the same warm planes as his body. Modern art meets ancient labor.
IN PROFILE
THINKER
A seated male figure in profile, head resting on a raised hand, body broken into the same warm planes as the chair and wall behind him. Gleizes painted these solitary thinkers as monuments of Cubist construction — the figure both deeply embedded in its environment and quietly distinct from it. The face simplified, the gesture eternal.
AROUND THE TABLE
GATHERING
A group of three or four figures around a midday table — bread, a wine bottle, a folded napkin between them. Gleizes painted these everyday gatherings as Cubist tableaus of community, each figure interlocked with the next and with the still life between them. The composition rewards close looking — every gesture, every glass, every shadow under the table is a separate small monument of geometric construction.
CUBISM STUDY (AI, 2026)
LÉGER — THE TUBULAR WORLD
Fernand Léger was a Cubist with a difference. Where his contemporaries fractured the world into flat planes, Léger built it from cylinders — tubular bodies, tubular trees, tubular machines. He served in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer and emerged convinced that modern industry and the modern body shared a single sculptural language. The two works captioned here, framed by a third image that needs no commentary, trace that conviction: a group of soldiers playing cards in close quarters, and a single workman among the gears of a factory.
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IN THE FACTORY
MACHINE
A single workman at the center of a factory, surrounded by gears, pipes, levers, and pulleys — all in the same warm tubular geometry. Léger believed that the modern worker was not diminished by the machine but made monumental by it; his body and his tools shared a sculptural identity. The square composition rewards close looking — every gear, every pipe junction, every glove and tool handle, every fragment of machine architecture is a separate small monument.
IN THE TRENCH
CARDS
During the war Léger sketched constantly — and the soldiers playing cards became one of his enduring motifs. The figures sit in close quarters, cylindrical bodies pressed together, helmets and uniforms reduced to warm tubular geometry. The card game itself is almost forgotten in the heavy monumentality of the bodies playing it. Modern soldier as modern machine.
CUBISM STUDY (AI, 2026)
GRIS — THE QUIET TABLE
Juan Gris brought Cubism to its most precise relation to everyday life. Where Picasso and Braque dissolved their objects into atmospheric grids, Gris built his still lifes with a mathematical clarity that distinguished him from both: every plane in a careful relation, the underlying grid almost visible, every object known by a quiet investigation into how it exists in space. The three works gathered here trace that quiet investigation: a single bottle and glass on a café table, a single open book in the morning light and a layered arrangement of guitar and newspaper.
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A LAYERED COMPOSITION
ARRANGEMENT
A larger still life — a guitar laid flat on a table, a newspaper folded beneath it, a glass behind, a pipe at the edge, a small bowl of fruit beside. Gris built these complex arrangements as carefully as Bach built fugues, every object answering every other, every plane both itself and a contribution to the whole. The composition rewards close looking — every guitar string, every fruit, every paper fold, every shadow under the table is a separate small monument of Cubist precision.
IN MORNING LIGHT
BOOK
A single open book on a small table by a window. Gris painted these reduced compositions in his last years, when illness had made him pare back to essentials. One object, one source of light, one quiet meditation on the geometry of the everyday. The book both itself and its idea — pages, spine, the small angle of the rising leaf.
AT THE CAFÉ
TABLE
A small café table with a wine bottle, a glass, and a folded newspaper. Gris painted these compositions throughout his career — the everyday objects of Parisian café life rendered with monumental Cubist precision. Each object both itself and its underlying geometric idea, the table a stage for quiet meditation on form.
CUBISM STUDY (AI, 2026)
DELAUNAY — PURE COLOR
Around 1913, Robert Delaunay made the move that separated him from his Cubist contemporaries. He abandoned the visible subject altogether and built compositions out of pure circular color — concentric discs of complementary hues, rotating against and through each other, the painting itself as a kind of light. He called this Orphism, after Orpheus the singer; the poet Apollinaire wrote the manifesto. The three works gathered here trace that move: an early disc composition with the city still visible in fragments behind it, the pure concentric disc as an autonomous object, and a late composition where the discs have multiplied into a swarm of rotating warm forms.
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MULTIPLIED FORMS
SWARM
A late work of Orphism, in which the original two discs have multiplied into a swarm of rotating circular forms, all rendered in warm tones.
CITY DISSOLVING
DISCS
An early Orphist composition — concentric warm discs rising over the fragmented suggestion of Paris rooftops and the Eiffel Tower. The city is still visible at the bottom, but the discs above dominate the canvas, asserting that color itself has become the painting’s subject. Delaunay’s moment of transition from analytical Cubism to pure abstraction.
