Femme au Fauteuil 1923

Albert Gleizes painted Femme au Fauteuil, with oils, playing with how we see. Gleizes simplifies everything to shapes and planes that just barely suggest a person, chair, or room. He seems to be asking what’s essential to our understanding of what we see, reducing forms to the point of abstraction. Looking closely at the light blue area, you can almost see how the brushstrokes drag. The paint is thin and matte, not glossy, and the light bounces around like jazz. The way he breaks down the image reminds me of Cézanne, someone who was trying to see the structure of things. The brown rectangle could be a book or part of the chair, but really it's a brown rectangle among other shapes and colours. It's about how painting can be like thinking, trying to construct something new from the pieces. Much like Picasso, Gleizes understands that ambiguity in art isn't a weakness, but a strength that invites us to engage more deeply, to ask our own questions, and to see the world with fresh eyes.