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Yet one can flatten Gris by imposing too heavy a classical stereotype on him. Quite often his art was as much about In jokes and irreverent manipulation as it was about balance, as Rosenthal points out. For cubism was created by a high-spirited clique of young outsiders, reacting to the pervasive, ephemeral surface of Parisian culture with puns and gossip, the arcane jokey language of their own group. As a former cartoonist, Gris delighted in this "Pop" view of his tunes, and it suffuses some of his best paintings. The Man at the Café, 1914, looks at first like a conventional cubist figure, the clues to its presence being the hat, the blue hand holding a newspaper, and the stein of beer with its " white froth. But if one reads the glued-on newspaper he is reading, the main story turns out to be about art forgery and how fingerprinting might be used as proof of authenticity.
In Gris' mind, this duality was part of the ever active debate over what was true and what false in cubist representation, where fragments of the real world (including the news) combined with unreal space. To complicate things further, the man at the café—melting away, like the elusive Pimpernel, into the wood work—probably depicts Gris' favorite character pulp fiction. He was a supercrook named Fantómas, whose nefarious deeds were eagerly devoured by Picasso, Apollinaire and everyone in the cubist circle. Appearing and disappearing at will, frustrating the law at every turn, Fantómas was to cubism what Superman, 50 years later, would be to Pop. He epitomized the grand game of detection, ambiguity challenging reality, that the cubists, Gris included, wanted to install at the center of painting. This game was what Juan Gris' use of collage was really about, and as a result his work in the high cubist years is seeded with puns, cross references and deadpan jokes that will keep art historians busy for some time yet.
But in the end, it is Gris the classicist who prevails. Not in his decorative form: Gris' compositional habits turn the corner from cubism into art deco and prepare the decorative style of the '20s, but that is secondary. Rather, what one admires is the stringent purity of his vision and the economy with which he deployed it. Conservative radical, or radical conservative? Both, at different times. If he had recovered from his slump in the '20s and lived an other 30 years, he might have turned out to be the equal of Mondrian.
—By Robert Hughes