In 1930, Anne Dangar joined the artist community at Moly-Sabata in Sablons, France, following a telegram invitation from cubist painter Albert Gleizes only a few months earlier. Gleizes had established Moly-Sabata in 1927 with the idea of providing a space for his followers to focus on their work free from the city and commercial pressures. Robert Pouyaud was the first to become a resident, with Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone briefly joining and staying with Gleizes in Serrières later that year. Gleizes had already experienced similar endeavours, having been involved in 1906 in the short-lived Abbaye de Créteil, an artistic and literary group founded on similar communal and anti-commercial ideals. Parallels can also be made with the Bauhaus School in Germany, which Gleizes was involved with from the mid-1920s; he likely modelled aspects of Moly-Sabata on its focus on craft, collaborative ethos and workshop system.
Unlike the state-funded Bauhaus, however, with its focus on standardised, industrial production, Moly-Sabata was a rustic, self-sufficient venture. Residents were expected to work collectively to grow their own food, contribute to chores, and generate income through communal artistic and craft work.
This arrangement also corresponded with Gleizes’s belief in the ideals of the retour à la terre, an agrarian movement that emerged in France following the First World War and emphasised the decentralisation of cities, repopulation of towns and regions, and overall return to the perceived simplicity of peasant culture. French earth, having been physically torn apart by bombardment and trench warfare, became a potent symbol of French nationalism in the interwar period, and redolent with aspirations for recovery and prosperity. This agrarian ideology reinforced Gleizes’s own aesthetic and spiritual theories: the patterns of the spiral were mirrored in the rhythms of self-subsistence, with the annual preparation of soil, sowing, tending to and harvesting of crops occurring in harmony with the seasons.
