NARRATOR:
In this tightly structured still-life by the Spanish Cubist Juan Gris, a wooden table becomes a series of angular planes, overlapping and jutting in various directions. Gris’s masterful painted illusion of wood, cloth, and paper incorporates varied patterns that simulate the textures of the actual materials. Gris called his painting “flat, colored architecture.” Here, the surface play of colored patterns and linear designs cancels out the illusion of depth created by the overlapping planes.
A few commonplace objects remain. Cubist favorites, they include, from left to right, playing cards, the fractured outline of a tall bottle, a goblet and a pipe. At the bottom is the text of a contemporary poem by Pierre Reverdy. Like the painting, the poem references simple everyday objects. Here, writing on paper becomes a visual artifact, another element in what Gris called “a pictorial emotion.” Gris’s fellow Cubist Georges Braque noted:
BRAQUE (ACTOR):
“When a man feels emotion at what he sees, it means that he has made some personal modification in the arrangement of cards or elements. Without abolishing or changing them, he has grouped them in a new way. He has shuffled the cards, and sees them set out in a different manner.”
NARRATOR:
Gris was one of the first exponents of Cubism. A neighbor of Picasso in Paris, he watched its development from 1907 to 1912. By 1915, when he made this painting, he was adapting Cubist innovations to his own methodical temperament to create a unique variation of the style.
Still Life with a Poem
1915
Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887-1927)
On View
Born in Madrid, Gris settled in Paris, joining the avant-garde circle of his compatriot Picasso and becoming one of the principal exponents of Cubism. Like his fellow Cubists Picasso and Braque, Gris experimented with collage, incorporating bits of wallpaper, fragments of mirror, and pages from books in his paintings from 1914. Although this picture, which dates from the following year, is painted entirely in oils, it imitates a collage in the convincing faux-wood grain of the table and the fictive scrap of paper that appears pinned to the bottom of the composition. This detail betrays Gris’s admiration for the seventeenth-century Spanish paintings he would have seen on childhood visits to the Prado. The text it bears, however, is decidedly modern: a poem written by the artist’s friend Pierre Reverdy, for whose collection of abstract prose poems Gris painted a set of watercolor illustrations.
Details
- Artist Name: Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887-1927)
- Title: Still Life with a Poem
- Date: 1915
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 31-3/4 x 25-1/2 in. (80.6 x 64.8 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1968.08.1.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
[Léonce Rosenberg, Paris];
[Edmond Rosenberg, Paris, by November 192, sold 1938 to];
Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Clifford, Philadelphia and Radnor, Pennsylvania.
[M. Knoedler & Co., New York];
Allan Bluestein, Washington, D.C. (sale, New York, Parke-Bernet, 3 April 1968, lot 19);
Norton Simon Inc. Foundation, Los Angeles;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
[Edmond Rosenberg, Paris, by November 192, sold 1938 to];
Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Clifford, Philadelphia and Radnor, Pennsylvania.
[M. Knoedler & Co., New York];
Allan Bluestein, Washington, D.C. (sale, New York, Parke-Bernet, 3 April 1968, lot 19);
Norton Simon Inc. Foundation, Los Angeles;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Juan Gris
- Paris, Galerie Roland Balaÿ et Louis Carré, 1938-06-13 to 1938-07-03
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- Steadman, David W., Art Journal,fig. 15
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- Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, Juan Gris: His Life and Work,fig. 23 p. 139
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum,1989, p. 189
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