Portrait of an Army Doctor [SEP] creator
Portrait of an Army Doctor
Portrait of an Army Doctor (in French Portrait d'un médecin militaire) is a 1914-15 painting by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the paintings abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870-1943), the regimental surgeon
in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though "Portrait of an Army Doctor" is one of the only major oil paintings of the period.
As other wartime works by Gleizes, "Portrait of an Army Doctor" represents a break from the first phase of Cubism. These wartime works mark "the beginning of an attempt to preserve specific and individual visual characteristics while experimenting with a radically different compositional treatment in which broad planes, angled