Gris, Juan

Gris, Juan (1887–1927). Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer, active mainly in Paris, where he was one of the major figures of Cubism. He was born in Madrid, the son of a wealthy merchant, and his real name was José Victoriano González (he had adopted his pseudonym by about 1905). From 1902 to 1904 he studied mathematics, physics, and engineering in Madrid, then took up painting, training with a local academic artist. In 1906 he moved to Paris and found accommodation in the Bateau-Lavoir, where Picasso was already living. For the next few years he earned his living mainly with humorous drawings for various periodicals and he did not begin painting seriously until 1910. However, he made such rapid strides that by 1912 he was becoming recognized as the leading Cubist painter apart from the founders of the movement, Picasso and Braque. His work stood out at the Section d'Or exhibition in that year, attracting the attention of collectors and dealers ( Gertrude Stein was among those who bought his paintings and Kahnweiler gave him a contract). In 1913–14 he developed a personal version of Synthetic Cubism, in which papier collé played an important part. He said that he conceived of his paintings as ‘flat, coloured architecture’ and his methods of visual analysis were more systematic than those of Picasso and Braque. His subjects were almost all taken from his immediate surroundings (mainly still-lifes, with occasional landscapes and portraits), but he began with the image he had in mind rather than with an object in the external world: ‘I try to make concrete that which is abstract … Cézanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I make a bottle—a particular bottle—out of a cylinder.’ Gris was able to continue working in Paris throughout the First World War, and in 1919 he had his first major one-man exhibition there, at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie l'Effort Moderne. In 1920, however, he was seriously ill, possibly with tuberculosis, and from then on his health was often poor; for this reason he spent much of his time in the South of France. He was only 40 when he died of kidney failure. In this last period of his life his style became more painterly (Violin and Fruit Dish, Tate Gallery, London, 1924). Apart from paintings, his work included polychrome sculpture, book illustrations, and set and costume designs for Diaghilev. Gris was of a logical turn of mind, but Douglas Cooper writes that he ‘always tempered his science with the workings of his personal sensibility, and the many pentimenti and freely invented passages in his paintings are evidence of his constant concern that the reality of natural forms should not be subjected to “monstrous” distortions dictated by some pre-determined design'. He wrote a few essays on his aesthetic ideas and a collection of his letters, edited and translated by Cooper, was published in 1956.