La Femme aux Phlox, also known as Woman with Phlox or Woman with Flowers, is an oil painting created in 1910 by the French artist and theorist Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). The painting was exhibited in Room 41 at the Salon des Indépendants in the Spring of 1911 (no. 2612); the exhibition that introduced Cubism as a group manifestation to the general public for the first time. The complex collection of geometric masses in restrained colors exhibited in Room 41 created a scandal from which Cubism spread throughout Paris, France, Europe and the rest of the world. It was from the preview of the works by Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger at the 1911 Indépendants that the term 'Cubism' can be dated. La Femme aux Phlox was again exhibited the following year at the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, 1912 (no. 35). La Femme aux Phlox was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres Cubistes) by Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1913. The same year, the painting was again revealed to the general public, this time in the United States, at the International Exhibition of Modern Art (The Armory Show), New York, Chicago, and Boston (no. 195). The work is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of the Esther Florence Whinery Goodrich Foundation in 1965.
Description
La Femme aux Phlox is an oil on canvas with dimensions 81.6 x 100.2 cm (32.1 by 39.4 inches) signed and dated 'Alb Gleizes 10'. Created during the second half of 1910, the painting represents a woman sitting in an interior setting, with a vase of flowers (phloxes) in front and another to her left. The window behind the sitter opens out onto an exterior scene, the whole blurring the distinction between interior and exterior.
In 1964 art historian Daniel Robbins writes of La Femme aux Phlox in the catalogue of the Gleizes Retrospective at the New York Guggenheim: Continuing his new interest in the figure, Gleizes strove to manipulate a genre subject with the same sobriety and broad scale that had always informed his landscapes. Thus, exterior nature is here brought into a room and the distant vista seen through the window is formally resolved with a corresponding interior shape.
Gleizes had sketched figures often enough, but because his search for a synthetic vision that would reconcile disparate elements had fostered a natural predilection for landscape, his figure paintings were few. The Salon des Indepéndants, 1910, saw the immediate influence of Le Fauconnier in Gleizes' large portrait of René Arcos.
In 1910 both artists continued to concentrate on figures: Le Fauconnier on a portrait of the poet Paul Castiaux and Gleizes on a majestic portrait of his uncle, Robert Gleizes. The two works are very close and establish Gleizes' debt to Le Fauconnier for having stimulated his interest to encompas a new and important element, the figure.
With its highly limited color palette Gleizes achieved in La Femme aux Phlox a masterful demonstration of monochromism, a relative and paradoxical monochromy, considering the subject matter of a woman with flowers.
The subject of Gleizes entries at the 1911 Indépendants are discernible to some extent and to some viewers, while it was claimed that others could see nothing. For Gleizes, the subject (the 'figurative support') is used only as an accessory, hidden under other values that are more specifically important. Gleizes writes in his Souvenirs: The subject—whether treated sentimentally or adapted to the formula of a gimmick that might be more or less amusing—the originality of a Henner, a Ziem, a Didier-Pouget, even of a Wlaminck—was subordinated to true, essential qualities that correspond to the plastic demands of painting; that certainly was the basis for the state of mind of this first stage in a radical change in the position of the painter, the stage that has, legitimately, the right to the name 'Cubism'. This stage in fact remains respectful of the classical 'three dimensions', emphasising 'volume'. Consequently, it remains within the framework of 'perspective', which suggests on a flat surface an illusion of depth. These are the values which we wanted forcefully to express and to place above those purely emotional concerns with which the mentality of painters of that time was satisfied, leading to a real atrophying of the form which other times had, by contrast, been able to develop and to exalt. (Gleizes, Souvenirs)