Introducing himself as an “ardent searcher after the purest form in art,” a young Parisian artist, Robert Pouyaud, wrote in 1924 to the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, asking him to correct the “error” of his art education. Gleizes responded by inviting Pouyaud to join in the collective exploration of his compositional exercises with his two Irish pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. Thus commenced a master-disciple relationship that soon had other consequences. In 1927, Pouyaud was a founding member of Moly-Sabata, a quasimonastic, rural art community established by Gleizes to unite urban artists with the soil. As Peter Brooke observes, Moly-Sabata became an intrinsic part of the artist’s history. It accompanied him “like an alter ego—the practical application of his ideas, the proof or otherwise that they were viable” (128).

What were those ideas, and why did Gleizes form a community to demonstrate them? How did this apparently unprepossessing man attract a small but fervent group of converts to his cause? It is hard to answer such questions without negotiating some of the anomalies of an artist Brooke regards as a great but “underestimated” and “often abused” twentieth-century painter (xi). While admitting his own partisan support for Gleizes, Brooke reveals a complex history that had many difficult and paradoxical aspects, not least of which were the ideologies motivating Gleizes’s group initiatives. As the subtitle of Brooke’s well-illustrated monograph suggests, Gleizes was a cultural polemicist who contested the twentieth century—a modern artist critically at odds with modernism.

Briefly, art and collectivism came together at the beginning of Gleizes’s career, when he cofounded the experimental community of poets and painters, the Abbaye de Créteil. Also in the prewar years, he participated in the famous Salon displays of the Puteaux Cubists and coauthored with Jean Metzinger the first substantial tract on the new movement—Du ‘Cubisme’ (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1912). During World War I, he joined Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in the expatriate avant-garde circles in New York. Upon his return to Paris he was among those artists who developed Cubism into a flat, geometric, concrete art, firstly as an exhibitor at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne and later as a member of the group Abstraction-Création. By this time his other role as a French regionalist was of growing importance to his new followers.

With the launch of Moly-Sabata, Gleizes became a committed advocate of the retour à la terre, using his own group in the Rhône Valley as the living example of a rural ideal modeled on small-scale medieval communities. Moly-Sabata was sustained for more than twenty years by another of his disciples, the Australian-born potter Anne Dangar, while Gleizes himself adopted the life of a farmer-painter on his rural estate, Les Méjades, in Provence. His group’s engagement with the earth involved the retrieval of the folkloric, artisanal, and spiritual traditions of rural France—a set of “returns” that Gleizes felt to be consistent with Cubism’s historical destiny.

Socially, Gleizes’s sobriety had made him an awkward figure in the avant-garde circles he initially frequented. In his personality as much as his art and ideas, the Cubist who “found God” in 1918 was no Picasso. His later effort to codify an objective, rhythmic, and religious basis for art was opposed to the classicism and humanism he associated with his more famous contemporary. Brooke, however, maintains that the artist’s quest for the “solid principles” of art had an “epic” dimension, comparable to theology in its scope (ix–x). Previously a scholar of Irish religious history, Brooke spent years in France studying Gleizes’s work, and his book shows the evidence of this in its extensive use of rare and unpublished sources. But how does his analysis redefine Gleizes in the wake of recent art-historical assessments of Cubism?

Generally, Brooke balances his commitment to Gleizes’s Cubist principles with recognition of the social and political difficulties of his ideas. He situates the artist’s project of cultural and spiritual renewal against its historical backdrop of industrialization, war, communism, and fascism. Nevertheless, Brooke defends Gleizes against the “right-wing, nationalist and traditionalist, attitudes” that he says other writers have attributed to him (28). He specifically cites Mark Antliff’s Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and David Cottington’s Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Brooke is reluctant about Antliff’s analysis of Gleizes’s prewar connections with the Ligue Celtique Française, a group that countered the Latinist and royalist Action Française with a more progressive but equally nationalist conception of France, based on Bergsonian organicist principles. He also disputes the application of the term “Bergsonian Cubist” to Gleizes, pointing out that in “L’Art dans l’évolution générale,” an unpublished manuscript of 1917, Gleizes summarized the prewar years without mentioning Bergson. For Brooke, the contentious issue is not the influence of Bergsonian metaphysics as such, but the politicizing and racializing effect of Bergson-inspired Celtic nationalism on the artist’s social ideas. Yet Brooke’s own view, that Gleizes’s wider philosophical and political outlook was “still unformed” before the war (28), negates the obvious parallels between the prewar Celtic revival and the artist’s later, deeply felt belief in a Celtic-Christian tradition.

Similarly, Brooke underplays the ethnocentric focus of Gleizes’s later approach to cultural identity. He argues that Gleizes described his nation’s racial origins in pluralistic terms in “L’Art dans l’évolution générale,” and yet by the 1930s the artist was lauding his fellow painter Robert Delaunay as essentially French, essentially Celtic, like himself. At the same time his closest followers (Irish, Australian, and French) were expressing their affinity with their perceived Celtic roots. Consistent with Gleizes’s definitions of religion, which Brooke discusses in detail, his disciples’ search for their common identity in the distant past was a binding agent, a unifying factor for the group. It was reinforced by a sense of history that privileged the early Christian West—a cultural lineage Gleizes distinguished from Christianity’s Latin and Eastern forms.

Brooke deals at length with Gleizes’s three most important interwar publications—La Peinture et ses lois (Paris 1924), Vie et mort de l’Occident chrétien (Sablons: Moly-Sabata, 1930), and Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris: Jacques Povolozky, 1932). In these texts the artist outlined his view of history as an organic cycle oscillating between spiritual and material epochs. This cyclical structure enabled his unusual coupling of Cubism and medievalism, as expressed in his desire for a collective school of constructive painting attentive to pre-Renaissance traditions, with an accompanying revival of premodern manual crafts at Moly-Sabata. Yet having opposed himself to the twentieth-century metropolis and its capitalist culture of the machine, Gleizes eagerly joined his Cubist colleagues in the modern mural decorations for the industrial pavilions at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. Such contradictions in his interwar theory and practice were further complicated by Gleizes’s increasingly politicized social activism.

Among the artist’s affiliations documented by Brooke was the Unions Intellectuelles Européennes, founded in 1921 by Prince Charles de Rohan, who Brooke describes as a later “apologist for German National Socialism” (141). Gleizes’s agrarian interests and his projections of a Celtic-Germanic alliance led him to support National Socialist policies as well. In the early 1930s, he was a constant contributor to the Parisian “Naturist” journal Régénération, since characterised as “a review openly admiring the racial policies of Hitler’s new Reich” in Romy Golan’s Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 103). Brooke’s counterargument is that Régénération was “essentially pacifist” in its political orientation (195). The problem of Gleizes’s pacifist yet pro-Nazi stance recurs in relation to his role during the Occupation. Though Brooke finds limited evidence of the “rumours of collaboration” concerning Gleizes, the artist took a pro-German view of the war and made a considerable effort to link his regional initiatives to Vichy’s nationalist policies. In 1942, he publicly advocated Philippe Pétain’s “intellectual and moral revolution” (235).

The shift in Gleizes’s cultural politics toward his conservative projections of “eternal” France during the Vichy years coincided with the progression in his religious thought from a syncretic spirituality to his formal acceptance of Catholicism in 1941. Having linked Thomism with the swing toward a classical and material state of mind from the thirteenth century onward, Gleizes had long resisted the modern Church. Like Pouyaud, he had been influenced by the French esoteric author René Guénon, who criticized the West for its loss of “the universal sacred tradition” that he believed was common to early European and non-Western religious cultures. Guénonism also reinforced the spiritual elitism in Gleizes’s circle, with disciples like Dangar exalting Gleizes as a prophetic figure who transcended his own time. Such inclinations inevitably caused friction with the Church, fueling debates about religion and tradition in Gleizes’s circle after the war.

In 1947, Gleizes’s “system” of sacred art was denounced by the influential Dominican priest Pie Raymond Régamey as “a new academic painting, all the more disturbing because it is abstruse” (249). On the other hand, Gleizes’s work was endorsed by the Abbaye de Sainte-Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire, a Benedictine monastery that published the journal Témoignages and later Zodiaque. The Benedictines, however, also grew critical of the Guénonism in the artist’s circle, and by 1950 these differences had caused a serious split among Gleizes’s closest disciples—a dispute Brooke examines with considerable care.

The release of this book in 2001 coincided with the major retrospective Albert Gleizes: Le cubisme en majesté (held at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons), for which Brooke contributed a catalogue essay and chronological notes. He has also been active as a translator of Gleizes’s theoretical writing, producing English editions of Art and Religion, Art and Science, Art and Production (London: Francis Boutle, 1999) and Painting and Its Laws (London: Francis Boutle, 2000). These have appeared soon after the two-volume Albert Gleizes Catalogue Raisonné (Anne Varichon, ed., Paris: Somogy Editions d’art and Fondation Albert Gleizes, 1998).

The above publications have reasserted Gleizes’s importance, but what was his legacy? Brooke concludes by appealing to the collective tradition Gleizes sought. He argues that the artist’s postwar disciples (notably the ceramicist Geneviève Dalban, who died in March 2002) offered “proof that what we are dealing with is not a particular, individual, finished style” (281). Brooke nevertheless acknowledges the failure to achieve a viable collaborative context: “The problem of transmission, which is largely the problem of establishing a real ‘traditional’ workshop, is still far from being solved” (282). This is “a problem of the age” that he urges us to consider.