A pioneer in cubism, Juan Gris had a split vision of reality
I find my pictures excessively cold," the cubist painter Juan Gris complained to his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in 1915. "Oh, how I wish I had the freedom and the charm of the unfinished! Well, it can't be helped. One must after all paint as one is oneself. My mind is too precise to go dirtying a blue or twisting a straight line."
Compared with that of Picasso or Braque, the inventors of cubism, Gris' work does seem programmed and synthesized: in its fondness for the grid and the deliberate repetition, it is a long way from the flickering mutability, the twisting disintegration of objects in newly imagined space, that gave early cubism its wildly adventurous look. Gris was a Madrileño—which was to say, a provincial, brought up in a far stodgier cultural milieu than Picasso the Catalan—and his work does not even look particularly "Spanish": no craziness, no tragedy, no genitals, no folklore.
Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic décor in the '20s, and by 1927, at 40, he was dead of uremia, the only major cubist not to live to a ripe old age.
The exhibition of 99 paintings, drawings and collages by Juan Gris at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, B.C., is of exceptional interest. Organized by Mark Rosenthal, an art historian from Berkeley, Calif, it will give most museumgoers in America their first proper look at one of the fundamental modernist painters. There have not been many unalloyed classicists in 20th century art, and although Gris' work has its avant-garde credentials, it can now be seen as he probably wanted it to be: as the extension, into a modern idiom (for cubism was, to him, a kind of ultimate language) of the tradition of calm, cerebrative painting that flowed from Chardin through Seurat, and whose essential subject was still life.
Dickering with his bottles, violins, fruit dishes, newspapers, pipes, siphons and fruit, Gris—so the conventional account runs—wanted to construct an ideal world, a nirvana of the inanimate, whose planes and contours fitted together in their complex reversals and transparencies like a perfectly thought-out puzzle: metaspace, as it were, a place beyond touch, in which only the eye can travel. There are few and sometimes no objective counterparts to the splits and mirrorings Gris imposed on his small theater of objects, but to examine the great, intricate still lifes of 1915-16 is to see fantasy and analysis held in equilibrium.