"Juan Gris, Cubism's Great Theorist," The World & I, July 1993, pp. 140-145.

Juan Gris: The Cubist Intellectual

Following the example of his compatriot Picasso, the Spanish-born Gris cut a distinctive figure in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde.

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Unlike the other members of the cubist movement's tetrarchy -- Picasso, Braque, and Léger -- Juan Gris (1887-1927) lived a short, relatively sad life, plagued by chronic depression and physical illness to which he succumbed at age 40. An exile from his native Spain, Gris struggled economically in France, never achieving the respectability enjoyed by his peers. The mother of his only child left him, and the boy, George, grew up in Madrid under the care of Gris's sister. Even in health he was saturnine and moody. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire recalled of his friend, "He wept romantically instead of laughing as in drinking songs."

As often as writers have told his melancholy story, they have linked him with Picasso. Indeed, Gris's art is unthinkable without the elder Spaniard's example. Yet, despite that profound debt, Gris steered his own artistic course with a vision sufficiently unique to situate him among cubism's elite.

Many have commented on his sobriety and devotion to his art, his "transcendental intensity," "mystic purity," and "ascetic mysticism." His is an art void of the eroticism of machismo Picasso -- Gris did not paint nudes. Absent is the cool composure of the classicist Braque -- Gris energized his compositions with swooping diagonals and acid colors. Lacking is the thematic diversity of the socialist Léger -- Gris painted still-lifes predominantly, only occasionally figures or landscapes. He sacrificed content in a monk-like dedication to his craft.

His champion Gertrude Stein said that for Gris "still-life is a religion."

Gris's highly intellectual approach made him the greatest theorist among the cubist painters. He portrayed the movement as a "natural reaction against the fugitive elements employed by the Impressionists." Cubists sought instead to transfix that which "remains in the mind through apprehension and is not continually changing." (1)  He was not uncritical of his adopted idiom, especially its early phase which he saw as "a sort of analysis which was no more painting than the description of physical phenomena was physics."

The solipsism of hermetic abstraction irritated him, and his words on the subject, in a 1919 letter to his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, still serve as a potent critique of abstract, particularly non-objective, art:

"Those who believe in abstract painting seem to me like weavers who think they can produce a material with threads running in one direction only and nothing to hold them together. When you have no plastic intention [i.e., a visual aesthetic] how can you control and make sense of your representational liberties? And when you are not concerned with reality how can you control and make sense of your plastic liberties?"

He did not wish to cut the ties with reality, but Gris was no realist. Instead, he possessed what one art historian characterized as "basic faith in the possibility of transfiguring reality without hopelessly compromising its identity."(4)   Accordingly, his canvasses retain illusionistic details and a palpable atmosphere. His works are more depictive and accessible than the more allusive and obscure exercises of his progenitors.

Own Method of Composition

Gris's independent notions of cubist abstraction demanded their own method of composition. Whereas Picasso and Braque derived abstract signs from analyzing objects, Gris claimed to begin with an abstract composition that he then modified to refer to representational subjects. "Gris based his compositions on an arrangement of differently coloured elements which he referred to as his 'flat, coloured architecture,' declared art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, one of the artist's greatest defenders. "He found it 'more natural to make subject "x" coincide with the picture that [he had] in mind than to make picture "x" correspond with a given subject.'" (3)

Gris, himself, repeatedly maintained this was the case: "I start with an abstraction in order to arrive at true fact," he avowed. "Cézanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I begin with a cylinder and create an individual of a special type: I make a bottle....For example, I make a composition with a white and a black and...I adjust the white so that it becomes a piece of paper and the black so that it becomes a shadow." (4) But art historian Christopher Green concludes that "however a priori it might be..., the painter's particular coloured architecture was abstracted from things seen."(5)   Indeed, it is difficult to believe Gris worked without still-life set-ups or models.

Precisely how he structured his a priori abstract coordinates remains elusive. Critics often refer to his "scientific precision," noting that his study of the Old Masters involved geometric analyses and copies of postcards of works by Corot, Cézanne, and Velázquez. Moreover, it is known that he composed using the "golden section" -- that relationship, believed to have "ideal" properties, by which a line is subdivided such that the ratio of the smaller section to the larger is proportional to the ratio of the larger to the whole. The underlying skeleton of his compositions is, however, impossible to excavate.

It seems the artist wanted it that way. Before his death, he instructed his wife and dealer to destroy his preparatory drawings. Of the few that remain, some indeed bear light pencil-drawn armatures over which more depictive forms are positioned. Thus, scholars agree that in practice -- after around 1917 -- Gris would first plot the general compositional components, then seek to simplify and harmonize the graphic arrangement into a synthetic order. This order generally featured what might be called visual equivalents -- congruent forms that serve to evoke different elements in different parts of the picture, taking on their independent meanings according to their varying contexts. As Cooper observes, "One finds, for example, the same oval form used in a single canvas to express the beak of a flute, the sphere of a glass, the neck of a bottle, the rose of a guitar and a bunch of grapes on a fruit bowl." Gris excelled at effecting this kind of graphic polyvalence.

Gris insisted his tinkering was deductive rather than inductive, based on "the relation between objects." Yet, according to Green, Gris's aesthetic was intellectual: "it projected the shaping power of knowledge onto perception. It's 'sole function' was to reveal 'the world of ideas which exists purely in the mind.'" (6)  Because the rules governing his formal invention remain so ambiguous, what seems likely is that Gris exaggerated his methodological idiosyncrasies as a way of differentiating himself, at least in theory, from his more famous forebears. The subtleties of approach that differentiate him from Picasso and Braque do not result in a fundamentally different art. For all his posturing, Gris was essentially a Picasso-Braque acolyte, and it seems he spent considerable intellectual and emotional energy trying to justify and personalize his appropriation of their achievements. Nevertheless, he always remained a couple of years behind.

From Madrid to Paris

José Vittoriano González was born in Madrid in 1887, the 13th of 14 children. Little is known of his early years beyond that he attended the School of Arts and Industries where his studies probably included engineering. By 1904 he had decided on a career as an artist and renamed himself "Juan Gris." His earliest surviving works are ex libris plates and Art Nouveau drawings published in local periodicals. To avoid military conscription, in 1906 he went to Paris and gravitated to the Montmartre tenement known as the Bateau-Lavoir where his countryman Picasso lived. There Gris joined the circle of avant-garde poets and artists that included Braque, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Maurice Raynal, and others. He met Kahnweiler, the cubist dealer, who would later represent Gris and write his biography.

It wasn't long before Gris abandoned his career as a Parisian magazine caricaturist and illustrator, and decided to join the avant-garde as a painter. His first efforts, in 1910, were Post-Impressionist still lifes, but having witnessed first-hand the invention of Cubism, he eagerly followed the path towards abstraction. With astonishing precocity he turned out cubist canvasses that resemble Picasso's analytic phase of 1909. These nearly monochromatic pictures contain still-life or figurative subjects composed of individually modeled polygons polarized along sweeping diagonals. The dynamic rays suggest shafts of light that shatter the objects into a prism of shimmering aluminum shards. Gris's early masterpiece in this vein is Homage ŕ Picasso (1912, Art Institute of Chicago), an icy-blue image which shows his paragon sitting cross-legged, wearing a military-style tunic, holding a primary-color-splashed palette in his left hand. The canvas was exhibited at the annual Salon des Indépendants, where it drew attention to the young emigre.

By Summer, Gris had formulated a new scheme whereby, as John Golding describes, "a linear framework, like an irregularly constructed leaded window or a metal grille, is clamped down over the figure and its setting, and then within each of the sections or compartments the subject is studied from a different point of view." The application of this method is evident in the witty burlesque Man in the Café (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) -- perhaps a throwback to his vocationa as cartoonist -- and in The Watch (The Sherry Bottle) (1912, private coll.) -- whose recurring circles play against the grid, echoing the circular timepiece and alluding to the perceptual time transfixed by cubist examination. When Apollinaire saw the new geometrized works he called Gris "the demon of logic." The "Gris grid" was adopted by several members of the so-called Section d'or group with whom Gris exhibited later that year, shortly before Kahnweiler signed a contract to buy all his canvasses.

Gris abandoned the grid in favor of a new technique whereby he divided the subject into long vertical strips. Then, within a year of Picasso's and Braque's first papier collés (pasted-paper drawings), Gris was gluing down newspapers, labels, and pages from books onto his canvasses. Whereas for Picasso and Braque, swatches of paper could refer to unrelated objects, even figures or space, Gris's collage elements are what they are: wood grain represents wood, newsprint a newspaper, etc. He used papier collé merely as a shorthand notation in his compositions.

In the Violin and Engraving (1913, The Museum of Modern Art) he went so far as to affix part of an actual engraving within a picture frame depicted in the background. He told Kahnweiler, "...the owner of the picture...is at liberty to substitute something else for this engraving--even his own portrait if he likes [...as] it won't upset the actual merits of the picture." In The Marble Console (1914, Maramount Coll., Winetka, IL), he even added a piece of mirror above the tabletop, explaining, "Surfaces can be recreated and volumes interpreted in a picture, but what is one to do about a mirror whose surface is always changing and which should reflect even the spectator? There is nothing else to do but stick on a real piece." Notwithstanding his literal use of collaged materials, Gris's compositions were far from mundane. The effusive oil and collage Flowers (1914, Hester Diamond) is imbued with a tonal richness whose beauty rivals Vuillard's most sumptuous decorative ensembles.

Mastery and Decline

When the war broke out, most of Gris's French colleagues went to the front, and many were wounded. Gris did not enlist, and remained in Paris where, as a foreigner, he was suspect. He could not return to Spain, however, since, like Picasso, he had left without paying the service exemption fee. His German dealer Kahnweiler was forced into exile and his gallery stock was seized by the government, leaving Gris with no source of income. Gertrude Stein helped out, and eventually Léonce Rosenberg struck a deal with Gris and virtually all of the Cubists for the duration of the war.

Gris and his companion, Charlotte Herpin, familiarly known as "Josette," left Paris for Beaulieu, Josette's hometown in the Touraine. There Gris composed colorful de-materialized still-lifes with airy stippled planes that recall Picasso's work of 1914. In a subsequent shift, he began working with overlapping solid planes, such as the pale blues and grays of his Portrait of Josette (1916, Prado). His various Commedia dell'Arte and peasant figures reflect what Cocteau called the "Call to Order," a return to traditional French themes in reaction to German "barbarism."

After the war when Kahnweiler returned to Paris he said of Gris, "I had left behind a young painter whose works I liked. I had returned to find a master." This is evident in a dazzling work like Violin and Glass (1918, Marc Blondeau, Paris), an exuberant tapestry of yellow, orange, and blue that anticipates Stuart Davis's jazz-inspired icons. It is also apparent in Harlequin at a Table (1919, Morton G. Neumann Coll.), in which the costume's diamonds radiate out patterning the entire composition. Only a few representational elements -- the hands, facial features, glass, and tassel -- fix the figure and table, which interpenetrate in a fascinating graphic amalgam.

But Gris's art would decline dramatically in the 1920s, adversely affected by his worsening physical condition and by his increasing commitments to stage design for Diaghilev's Monte Carlo ballet productions. Some of his soft puffy figures are positively bizarre, such as the Seated Harlequin (1923, Carey Walker Foundation) which seems more a Botero-esque Léger than a cool "logical" Gris. Still there were flashes of astounding pictorial concision, like Guitar with Sheet of Music (1926, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenburg, NY). This brilliantly stripped-down, yet marvelously articulated still-life consists of no more than twenty polygonal panels of solid red, gray, yellow, blue, or brown paint. Yet, despite the utter subjectivity of this remarkable "color-field" canvas, even at the height of cubist abstraction, Gris's subject matter remains fully in tact. It reminds us of what was lost with Gris's untimely death.

NOTES

(1) Gris's 1925 response to a questionnaire from the Bulletin de la Vie Artistique.

(2) James Thrall Soby, Juan Gris [exh. cat.], The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 110.

(3) Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, New York, 1970, p. 93.

(4) The painter's response to a questionnaire circulated to the cubists by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, editors of L'Esprit Nouveau in 1921.

(5) Christopher Green, et. al., Juan Gris, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in association with Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 312, p. 68.

(6) Green, p. 68; quoting Gris's 1924 lecture at the Sorbonne.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©