Abbaye de Créteil

L'Abbaye de Créteil or Abbaye group (French: Groupe de l'Abbaye) was a utopian artistic and literary community founded during the month of October, 1906. It was named after the Créteil Abbey, as most gatherings took place in that suburb of Paris.

L'Abbaye de Créteil group was a phalanstère, a utopian community, founded in the autumn of 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes, and the poets René Arcos (), Henri-Martin Barzun (), Alexandre Mercereau and Charles Vildrac. The movement drew its inspiration from the Abbaye de Thélème, a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel Gargantua. It was closed down by its members early in 1908.

Georges Duhamel and Vildrac settled in Créteil, just to the southeast of Paris, in a house in a park-like setting along the Marne River. Their aim was to establish a place of freedom and friendship favourable for artistic and literary creativity.

Henri-Martin Barzun (father of the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun) was a financial contributor to his friends at the Abbaye de Créteil.

In an unpublished part of his Souvenirs Gleizes wrote that an initial idea for the Abbaye of Créteil was to escape from corrupt Western civilization to the simplicity of life in the South Seas, as he then believed Gauguin had done. (Robbins, 1964)

The group tried to create a publishing house that would bring in sufficient income to support the Abbaye. The typographer Lucien Linard (), a friend of Albert Gleizes, furnished the printing press. From January 1907 through January 1908, some twenty books were published by the Abbaye. Barzun, more sophisticated than the other idealists of the Abbaye, introduced Gleizes to the specific history of Utopian socialism. Though Gleizes did not enter the Abbaye with a specific program in mind. The art historian Daniel Robbins, is responsible for laying out the filiations between the Paul Fort's Vers et Prose, the Abbaye, post-Symbolist writers and politically engaged aesthetic thinking that would lead Gleizes to Cubism. Robbin's pioneering work brought the history of the Abbaye to an Anglo-American readership. He characterized their endeavors as a 'search for a synthetic modern art' that gave expression to social ideas. In his 1964 Guggenheim essay on Gleizes, Robbins developed these notions and summarized them as:

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