Woman with animals (Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon) (La dame aux bêtes [Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon]), completed by February 1914. Oil on canvas, 77 5/16 x 45 15/16 inches (196.4 x 114.1 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice  76.2553.17. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

As in a number of his other paintings of this period, Albert Gleizes depicts a domestic interior scene in a self-consciously “modern” style. Here the seated woman is the wife of Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the sculptor who took part in the discussions of the Cubist group at Puteaux during the early 1910s. She is portrayed as the epitome of bourgeois complacency, in a large armchair, with her dog and two cats, sensible tie shoe, wedding band, and string of beads. Typically Cubist elements are the fusion of figure and ground, the frontal, centralized pose, the multiple views of the sitter’s face, the choppy brushstrokes defining and shading planes, and the patterning of areas to resemble collage. Futurist devices are the repetition of form to describe movement (the dog’s wagging tail) and planar intersections and force lines meant to express notions of the dynamic interpenetration of matter and atmosphere.

Lucy Flint