His beginnings were Impressionist. He was only twenty-one when La Seine à Asnières (The Seine at Asnières) was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year he participated in the first Salon d'Automne and soon came under the influence of Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1907 Gleizes and several friends pursued the idea of a self-sufficient artists' community where they could develop their art free of commercial concerns. For almost a year, Gleizes and other painters, poets, musicians and writers gathered to create in a large house in Créteil. Lack of income forced them to leave in early 1908, and Gleizes temporarily moved to La Ruche, the artists' commune in Paris's Montparnasse district.
In 1910 he embraced Cubism, becoming one of its earliest and most important theorists alongside Jean Metzinger. He exhibited at that year's Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1912 he collaborated with Metzinger on Sobre el cubismo y los medios para comprenderlo, providing theoretical and aesthetic foundations. That autumn, he and Metzinger joined the Puteaux Group, also known as Section d'Or, led by Jacques Villon and his brother Marcel Duchamp. In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new painting style to American audiences at New York's Armory Show.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Albert Gleizes enlisted in the French army. Assigned to organise entertainment for the troops, he was approached by Jean Cocteau to design sets and costumes for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Discharged in autumn 1915, Gleizes and his new wife Juliette Roche, daughter of a prominent, wealthy French statesman, moved to New York. They then sailed to Barcelona, where Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia and his wife joined them. The group spent the summer painting around Tossa de Mar, and in December Gleizes held his first solo exhibition at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona. Back in New York, he began writing poetry and prose. He travelled to Bermuda, painting landscapes, and after the war ended returned to Europe, where his career increasingly turned towards teaching through writing and involvement in the committee of the Unions Intellectuelles Françaises.
In 1923 he independently published La pintura y sus leyes, announcing the return of religious art and reassessing medieval artistic production.
Still dreaming of his communal days in Créteil, in 1927 he founded an artists' colony in a rented house called Moly-Sabata in Sablons, near his wife's family home in Serrières, in the Ardèche department of the Rhône Valley.
In 1931 Gleizes joined the committee of Abstraction-Création, a forum for international non-representational art. By then his work reflected his strengthening religious convictions, and his 1932 book La Forme et l'histoire examined Celtic, Romanesque and Eastern art. Touring Poland and Germany, he gave lectures entitled Art et Religion, Art et Production and Art et Science, and wrote an unpublished book on Robert Delaunay. In 1937 Gleizes was commissioned to paint murals for the Paris International Exposition. He collaborated with Delaunay on the Pavillon de l'Air and with Léopold Survage and Fernand Léger on the Pavillon de l'Union des Artistes Modernes. In late 1938 he volunteered for the free seminars and discussion groups Delaunay established in his Paris studio.
In the late 1930s, wealthy art enthusiast Peggy Guggenheim bought numerous new works in Paris, including works by Albert Gleizes. She took them to the United States, and they subsequently became part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. During the Second World War, Gleizes and his wife remained in German-occupied France. His religious convictions deepened, and by the war's end some acclaimed him as the writer who had established principles for renewing religious art. In 1948 he accepted a Casablanca publisher's invitation to create drawings illustrating Blaise Pascal's Pensées sur l'Homme et Dieu. In 1951 he became a Prix de Rome juror, and the French government awarded him the Legion of Honour. In 1952 he created his final major work, a fresco entitled Eucharist for the Jesuit chapel in Chantilly.
Albert Gleizes died in Avignon, Vaucluse, in 1953 and was buried in his wife's family mausoleum in Serrières cemetery.
