The Schoolboy 1924

Albert Gleizes made 'The Schoolboy' with oil on canvas. What strikes me here is the stillness in the shapes, and the way the artist has almost poured the paint into each area, like filling shapes in a coloring book. Each tone sits next to each other, but there’s very little blending or mixing. The canvas becomes a surface of different planes and angles. My eye keeps going back to the 'schoolboy's' face. It feels so graphic, almost like a diagram. It's also split, white on one side, black on the other, as if Gleizes wanted to dissect and represent the many sides of this figure. Maybe this is a psychological portrait, trying to find the inner life of this young man, not just the exterior. This reminds me a bit of Juan Gris, who also took the visual language of Cubism to try to represent the interior lives of his subjects. Ultimately, art is a conversation and we must try to explore the meaning in that.