Paysage avec moulin (Landscape with Mill)

Paysage avec moulin (Landscape with Mill) exemplifies and contains the main Cubist principles set out by Albert Gleizes in 1913: the initial balance, established in the compositional structure by means of the interaction of lines, surfaces and volumes, the relationship exerted by some forms onto others by virtue of their spatial situation on the canvas, and the way the object is not considered from one fixed viewpoint but is definitively reconstructed according to aspects discovered as the viewer actually moves. Paysage avec moulin thus forms part of the most authentically Cubist of the artist’s periods, and is one of a small series of paintings done in 1913, which all share the same name and subject matter. At one time, one of the works in the small group belonged to Jacques Villon, perhaps the most important member of the Puteaux Group, to which Gleizes also belonged in 1912.

Paloma Esteban Leal