How Is Juan Gris Art Similar to Other Artists

Art VIEW

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October 23, 1983

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Among the progenitors of Cubism, Juan Gris has never had the kind of universal constituency that has for many years attached itself both to Picasso and (to a lesser but still considerable extent), to Braque. He is known to have made a contribution to Cubism that, from 1913 to 1915 in particular, was equal to theirs. In the great Cubist exhibition that was held at the Tate Gallery in London last summer, there was a long wall of paintings by Gris that came as a revelation to people who had previously seen his paintings only in ones and twos.

Individual paintings by him stand up out when nosotros come across them in American museums. No matter how often nosotros look, for case, at his ''Breakfast'' of 1914 in the Museum of Mod Fine art, nosotros fall in honey with it all over again - so perfectly timed are the strokes of wit, so deft the dialogue with the nifty French even so lifes of the immediate past, and so majestic the final upshot that was planned in its every final item and carried out to perfection.

From Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio, from Minneapolis to the Fogg Art Museum in Harvard and from Chicago to Smith College in Massachusetts, the same good news could exist brought. A bully Gris stays with united states of america forever. Information technology stands for an imaginative energy, a multiplicity of lucid statement and an apparently limitless invention. It likewise stands for a depth and strength of color that on the whole were excluded from Cubism. Where Picasso and Braque in the heroic years worked by taking color out, Gris worked by putting it in.

But the career of Juan Gris was brusk (he died in 1927 at the age of 40), and he had neither the mammoth output nor the hardly less mammoth estate that gives scholars, dealers and critics something to talk up every 24-hour interval of the year. He had a Spaniard's distinction of bearing, only he also had a Spanish reticence.

For this and other reasons the only major monograph on Gris is still the one past his friend and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, which dates substantially from 1947. Gild was brought into the record of Gris's achievement by the publication in 1977 of Douglas Cooper'due south catalogue raisonne, and Mr. Cooper's edition of his letters (privately printed in 1955) is cherished by those who possess information technology. But the bibliography of Gris is almost absurdly short, in relation to his status as a painter. There is in fact less to read near him than about any other major painter of our century. Nor is at that place a museum in this country where we can survey his work, yr-circular, from its beginnings in 1910 to the twelvemonth of his expiry.

The retrospective exhibition of Juan Gris at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., is therefore on more than one count an event of quite exceptional interest. It is the first American museum exhibition that Gris has had since 1958. It has been very well chosen and catalogued (by Mark Rosenthal, who is at present curator of 20th century fine art at the Philadelphia Museum). It has been given a pigeon-gray installation, with just the kind of infinite that Gris needs to make his total effect. If you want to know what Gris was all nearly, this is the prove to see.

It comes, moreover, with an annex of Cubist paintings from the National Gallery's ain collections. Though not large, this addendum includes more than 1 outright masterpiece - not least the big structure called ''Guitar'' by Picasso, which dates from 1926 and was caused by the National Gallery not long ago. Faced with the power, the free energy and the daring of this gaunt, implacable image, we run across exactly what his colleagues and rivals were up against in the mid-1920's.

Meanwhile, at that place is something mysterious most the beginnings of Juan Gris. He arrived in Paris from his native Madrid in 1906 and in no time at all was living in the same building as his compatriot Picasso. His offset surviving paintings date from 1910, but it is difficult to believe that they are a beginner's work. The ''Siphon and Bottle'' of 1910 at the National Gallery has a grand, spare, unhesitating stardom that puts it high in the catechism of still lifes that took off from the example of Cezanne. Whether he covered the tracks of a long and reasoned evolution, or whether he moved in a moment from apprenticehood to mastership is not easy to say. (He was, by the way, a natural learner, and every bit late equally 1916 he was making copies later on Cezanne of a kind that neither Picasso nor Braque e'er thought of attempting.)

He was very much his own man, moreover, even though he was shut to artists of genius who were already well under fashion. He was seven years younger than both Picasso and Braque and well-nigh 20 years younger than Matisse, with whom he was very friendly at a crucial stage in his development. At no time did he ''paint like Matisse,'' but he took the theme of an open window from Matisse and equally early on as June 1915 he gave the view from that window a moon-blueish radiance that was quite new in Cubism.

He besides had an acrobatic lightness of bear on and a virtuosity of execution that were quite singled-out from either the drop-dead claiming of Picasso or the hallowed serenity with which Braque managed to invest all that he did. Working for the near part with still life subjects, he managed (Mark Rosenthal'south catalogue essay is very good on this) to bring Cubism into line with the tradition of still life every bit it had existed in Kingdom of spain in the 17th century. His wood was more wooden than wood, that is to say. His violins seemed to sing out without human intervention. His newspapers make us want to plow the page.

No one amongst the founding fathers of Cubism risked more than he when the time came to open out the closed world of what used to be called hermetic Cubism. ''The Pot of Geraniums'' of 1915 is a upper-case letter example of this. It has the monolithic table elevation, the dado, the obsessive patterning and the newspaper that past then were standard Cubist properties. But it monitors the weather through the open window in a way that was quite new for Cubism.

It also has another novelty in Cubist iconography - a geranium institute, with leaf later on leaf detailed in naturalistic style. Gris felt gratis to motility all these elements around as suited him best, reordering the world with a godlike assurance and persuading usa that information technology just had to be like that, fifty-fifty if it had never been similar that before.

In paintings by Gris of this date and sort there is sounded a euphoric annotation of the kind that is struck by a painting we see even before we get within the door. This is the ''Mural with Houses at Ceret'' of 1913 that beckons exterior the entrance to the bear witness. To those who know the little town of Ceret past the tobacco-brown landscapes that had been painted there by Picasso, there volition be many a surprise in the riot of colour that Gris was able to foment with the same material.

Like everybody else, Gris was deeply affected by World State of war I. There is in the National Gallery bear witness a painting called ''Even so Life with Plaque,'' dated 1917, that has all the elements of an everyday still life. But the oil paint has been used in such a way equally to simulate a particularly funereal kind of granite, and when nosotros expect at the plaque in which the painter's name and the engagement are cutting as if with a chisel, we could error the image for a tombstone.

It has long been the accepted wisdom that after the end of Earth State of war I Juan Gris took refuge from ill health in sugariness pattern-making. Weak in itself - and then the story ran - his belatedly work looked all the weaker when gear up beside the monumental achievements of Picasso, Braque and Leger at the same time. Mr. Rosenthal looks that idea in the face and works hard to stare information technology down with the help of some strong and tranquil nevertheless lifes from 1925 and 1926 and an balletic change of tone here and there.

A particularly happy shift of ground in that context is the introduction of a naturalistic portrait drawing of Madame Lipchitz that has an angelic distinction of touch. Equally for the tardily still lifes, they bear out what the eminent Swedish surgeon Dr. Philip Sandblom has lately said - that Juan Gris is, apart from everything else, an inspiring example of how non to be destroyed by affliction, no matter how painful that illness may exist. As strong-minded valedictions, they hold their footing.

The testify can be seen at the National Gallery through December. 31. It then goes to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif., from Feb. 1 though April 8, 1984. Its last showing will be at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from May 18 through July 15, l984.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/23/arts/art-view-juan-gris-the-other-cubist.html

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