Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon


Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon also known as Paysage avec personage, is an oil on canvas painted in 1911 by the artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants during the spring of 1911, Paris; Les Indépendants, Musée moderne de Bruxelles, 1911; Galeries Dalmau, Exposicio d'art cubista, Barcelona, 1912; Galerie La Boétie, Salon de La Section d'Or, 1912. The painting was reproduced in the journal Le Siècle in an article titled Enquête sur le Cubisme, by Olivier Hourcade.
Le Chemin was identified by Hector Feliciano as having been plundered by the Nazis from the home of collector Alphonse Kann during World War II. It was returned to the heirs of Alphonse Kann in July 1997 and placed at public auctions in New York and London respectively.

Description

Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 146.4 x 114.4 cm, signed and dated 'Albert Gleizes 1911' ; signed again and titled 'Alb Gleizes Paysage'. This work, painted at the outset of 1911, represents a human figure walking through a hilly landscape with trees, houses or villas, a bridge over the Seine river, and a town with a church on the 'horizon', consistent with elements of the town in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, Meudon.
The term 'Cubism' was employed for the first time in June 1911 by Guillaume Apollinaire, speaking in the context of the Indépendants exhibition in Brussels which included this work by Gleizes, along with others by Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and Henri Le Fauconnier. During the summer, Gleizes was in close contact with Jean Metzinger, who had recently moved to Meudon. Gleizes too lived and worked in the western suburbs of Paris, 24 Avenue Gambetta, Courbevoie. The Gleizes' family moved to Avenue Gambetta in 1887. Both artists were discontent with the conventional perspective mechanism. They had long conversations about the nature of form and perception. They agreed that traditional painting gave a static and incomplete idea of the subject as experienced in life. Things, they would conclude, are in fact dynamic, observed to move, are seen from different angles and can be captured at successive moments in time.

Cubism

Paysage à Meudon, Gleizes' largest painting to date, is the principal product of "rodage" with Jean Metzinger. In his Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, David Cottington writes of Paysage à Meudon:
Just as in the works of Metzinger, and unlike those of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque of the same period, Gleizes had no interest in the flattening of the entire surface, of fusing background and foreground to the point where all spatial depth of field was abandoned. Yet Gleizes made use of fragmentation of form, multiple perspective views along with linear and planar structural qualities. Gleizes' Les Baigneuses of the following year employs the same concept of multiple perspective, but not at the expense of vacating spatial depth. Though highly sophisticated in theory, this aspect of simultaneity would actually become quite commonly employed within the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deployed these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner".
In his catalogue preface for the 1911 Indépendants de Bruxelles, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of this painting, titled Le chemin:
"Il est sorti un art simple et noble, expressif et mesuré, ardent à la recherche de la beauté et tout prêt à aborder ces vastes sujets que les peintre d'hier n'osaient entreprendre."

Gleizes' Proto-Cubist work entitled L'Arbre exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants in Paris was the point of departure for Paysage à Meudon. Visibly distant from the work of Picasso or Braque, Paysage à Meudon is stylistically much closer to Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay. Gleizes' interpretation of space in a succession of plans and simple geometric lines descends directly from the teachings of Paul Cézanne. These same aesthetic preoccupations would unite several artists that formed a group and held meetings in Puteaux, at the Duchamp residence. For their first public manifestation as a group—the Salon de la Section d'Or of 1912—Gleizes chose to present this 1911 landscape, along with Les Baigneuses and the monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons both of 1912.
In their Lot Notes for the 1999 sale, Christie's writes:
In their Lot Notes for the 2010 sale, Christie's writes:
The Salon des Indépendants at which Le Chemin had been exhibited was held from 21 April to 13 June in the spring of 1911; so Gleizes' painting could not possibly have been made "in the summer of 1911" as stated in the Christie's catalogue notes.

History

had been admired for his extraordinary taste and keen eye. Before the war his collection included at least thirty-five paintings by Picasso, in addition to many others by artists such as Braque, Klee, Matisse, Manet, Courbet, Renoir. Paysage à Meudon was among approximately 130 works that had been looted from the Kann collection by the German Occupation Army in 1940. The National Museums of Recuperations recovered Paysage à Meudon in 1949 and it subsequently went into the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris. On 11 July 1997 the Musée National d'Art Moderne returned Gleizes' Paysage à Meudon, stolen by Nazi occupiers during the Second World War, to the heirs of the art collector Alphonse Kann.
Didier Schulman, a curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, confirmed the return of the painting to Francois Warin, grand-nephew of Alphonse Kann. The Gleizes painting was one of 2,000 objects returned to France from Germany after the war. If a work remained unclaimed, they were temporarily entrusted to museums. These artworks are known as National Museum Recovery. Francois Warin learned of the Gleizes painting from a book written in 1997 by the journalist Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum, which traces the fate of many works confiscated by the Nazis.
Feliciano found Gleizes' Landscape while researching his book. The painting was listed in documents of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi government branch that supervised the confiscation of artworks in France. Feliciano said that after plundering the painting, the Nazis brought it to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris where confiscated artworks were deposited.
"For the Germans it was degenerate art so they bartered it or sold it for the type of paintings they liked," said Feliciano. Because the Nazis considered Cubism, Futurism and Impressionism "degenerate", German art dealers were able to inexpensively acquire them or exchange them for less valuable works that the Nazis coveted.
France's Cour des Comptes, a state spending 'watchdog' charged with conducting financial and legislative audits of public and private institutions, accused the museums of failing in their legal duty to seek out the owners or heirs of the works, including paintings by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and sculptures by Auguste Rodin. In an attempt to rebut the charges, French authorities put 900 of the MNRs on exhibit in five national museums, including The Louvre and the Pompidou Centre. Gleizes' Paysage à Meudon was among them. The state-museum network explained that few or none of the works in its possession were looted from Jews, but were sold to the Nazis by collaborationist dealers in the wartime Parisian art market. However, works such as the Gleizes, were indeed seized from Jews deported to death camps or fleeing persecution, or sold under duress at rock-bottom prices.
Feliciano accused state museums of doing nothing to try to return the MNRs to their owners. Warin had to wait a year to recover the work after his original claim, even though documents listing the Gleizes were in France's Foreign Ministry archives.
"This is proof the museums haven't done their job for 50 years,'' Feliciano said. "They had these documents in their hands."

''Paysage près de Paris''

Le Chemin was not the only work by Gleizes to be looted by the Nazis: Paysage près de Paris, also referred to as Landschaft bei Paris and Paysage de Courbevoie, 1912, an oil on canvas of dimensions 72.8 x 87.1 cm, has been missing from Hannover since 1937. This work is listed in the Lost Art Internet Database. Formerly in the collection of Dr. Paul Erich Küppers, Hannover, Germany, the painting was confiscated by the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Hannover from Leihgabe im Landesmuseum Hannover, Beschlagnahme 1937, Gal. Buchholz Berlin, and has been missing ever since.

Provenance