Stop and Look – Juan Gris 1887-1927
Gris was a Spaniard, born in Madrid with the name José Victoriano Gonzáles Perez. He moved to Paris in 1909 and died there of kidney failure at the early age of forty, having evolved a style that was based on the Cubism developed by Pablo Picasso, another Spaniard living in Paris, and his associate the Frenchman Georges Braque.
Their American friend the writer Gertrude Stein said of Gris: “he was very melancholy and effusive and always clear sighted and intellectual.” She also said, “as a mystic it was necessary for him to be exact… Picasso … by nature the most endowed had less clarity of intellectual purpose.”
It’s interesting that several of the most important early abstractionists were preoccupied with matters spiritual. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian was interested in Theosophy, the Englishman Ben Nicholson became a Christian Scientist. Gris was, as Stein calls him, ‘a mystic’, and it seems, in retrospect, that abstraction must coexist with a need to penetrate worlds beyond the physical and material. (Picasso, a confirmed materialist, hardly ever painted a true abstraction.)
Gris married the formal disintegration of “analytical” Cubism, as a pictorial exploration of ways to present three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane, with a logical clarity that springs from his “passion for exactitude”. This translated to a desire to create satisfying abstraction out of piecemeal representation, an impulse allied to music, in particular the music, Stein suggests, of Bach. The result was “synthetic” Cubism.
Gris wasn’t the only “synthetic” Cubist – both Picasso and Braque moved on to develop the new version at the same time, as did several others. An important new ingredient in the new Cubism is colour (the pictures of analytical Cubism had been restricted to a palette of greys and browns. In fact, Picasso was never much of a colourist and throughout his life often preferred to work in monochrome). Gris uses colour to ravishing effect. Here he creates a lovely counterpoint of of brown, cream and blue, set off by wedges of black.
He also redeploys the fragmented elements of Cubism to make sensuous patterns, lines and planes echoing and complementing each other. The fragmented table, coffee pot, cups and saucers, spoons, eggcups and newspaper find harmonious positions in Gris’ design, where the tension between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional becomes one of the themes of a subtly integrated pattern. Gris’ Cubism is more both more beautiful and more intelligible than that of either Picasso or Braque. No wonder Juan Gris was, as Stein said, “the only person whom Picasso wished away.”
