The Temperament of Juan Gris

Author(s): Douglas Cooper

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 8 (Apr., 1971), pp.
358-362
Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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The Temperament Though highly respected and praised,JuanGrishas never
been properly recognized as the great creative artist he
of Juan Gris undoubtedly was. In America, for instance, he has been
the victim of a foolish prejudice, which consists of be-
DOUGLAS COOPER
lieving that after 1918 his painting declined in inspiration
Arthistorianand guest director of The CubistEpoch and interest. But I suspect that Gris's temperament, or
artistic personality, has also played a part in delaying
The Cubist Epoch,a comprehensive full appreciation of the masterly nature of his work as a
display of cubism in all its aspects, whole. For Gris's painting is austere, his method of com-
is presented jointly with The
LosAngeles County Museum of position depends to a great extent on intellectual reason-
Art. Includingmore than 300
works of art, it will be on view at ing and calculation; he put little emphasis on sensuous
the MetropolitanMuseum from and emotional values and avoided any conscious form
April9 throughJune 8 of humor. Therefore Gris's paintings oblige the spectator
to think before he begins to enjoy them. But, on the other
hand, Gris's formal equations and his insistence on the
facts of reality are the source of great visual satisfaction,
just as his eminently personal sense of color is evocative,
PlayingCardsand Glassof Beer, 1913, by JuanGris fresh, and exciting.
(1887-1927),Spanish.Oil and collage, 205/8x 143/8inches. Jose Victoriano Gonzales, who in 1906 adopted the
The Columbus Galleryof Fine Arts,Columbus, Ohio, Gift of
FerdinandHowald, 31.61 pseudonym of Juan Gris, was born in Madrid on March
23, 1887, of a bourgeois family. Once his elementary
schooling was over, Gris worked under an academic
artist in Madrid and, for a while, attended the School of
Artand Industry,where his trainingwas primarilyof a tech-
nical and scientific nature. But a passion for drawing and
painting seems to have declared itself early and, since
Gris's financial resources were extremely meager, he
hastened to turn this to profitable account by submitting
humorous drawings to the Spanish periodicals Blanco y
Negro and Madrid Comico. However, by the age of nine-
teen, Gris, like many other aspiring young Spanish artists
of his generation, became acutely aware of the provincial
climate of his native land and felt inexorably drawn to
Paris,then the artistic center of the world. As a result, he
left home for Paris in the fall of 1906 and arrived there
with no money but a firm resolve to make his mark as a
serious artist.
Somehow Gris found his way to Montmartre and to
the now famous studio building known as le bateau-
lavoir, where he established himself in a modest studio
alongside his compatriot Pablo Picasso. During the next
few years he managed to keep himself alive by continuing
to make humorous and satirical drawings for such popu-
lar French periodicals as L'Assietteau Beurre, Le Cri de
Paris, Le Temoin, and Le Charivari.But at the same time
he was working on his own to become a serious painter.
At last, at the end of 1911, he felt sufficiently sure of the
progress he had made to allow some of his works to be

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shown in the shop of Sagot, a Montmartrejunk dealer.
Thereafter, he exhibited regularly in the salons with his
friends and began to make a personal contribution to
cubism.
During these first five years in Paris, Gris had been
a silent but actively observant witness of the birth and
progressive development of cubism. Earlyon he had be-
come friendly with Picasso, and through him had met
Braque and various other painters as well as poets and
critics like Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre Sal-
mon, and Maurice Raynal, who were closely associated
with the cubist painters. Although Gris was fully con-
versant with the cubist pictorial idiom and the aims of
its creators, he preferred to start independently from the
beginning in order to arrive at his own form of cubist
painting, rather than starting from the point to which
Braque and Picasso had progressed by 1911. That is to 361/4 Landscapeat Ceret, 1913, by Gris. Oil on canvas,
x 235/8inches. Moderna Museet, Stockholm
say, Gris - essentially thorough and methodical- began,
as had Braqueand Picasso four years earlier, from a per-
sonal re-examination of what had been achieved by
Cezanne in order to pursue his stylistic discoveries in
accordance with conceptions of his own. Thus his pictorial
aims were, from the start, more or less the same as those
of Braque and Picasso but, as his own painting idiom
evolved, so Gris came to invent other compositional
and representational devices to give pictorial reality to
the solid, tangible aspects of things.
For example, Gris used more accentuated chiaroscuro
in his early works than Braqueor Picasso had ever done,
and used directed light to fragment his forms. Then he
devised a linear network that imposed a formal organiza-
tion on his canvas while allowing him to represent diff-
erent simultaneous aspects of an object within each en-
closed area. Next Gris developed a system of parallel, but
subtly displaced, vertical and oblique planes covering the
whole surface of the canvas, on which he either repre-
sented some particularaspect of an object or completed
its representation by drawing a complementary aspect,
thus repeatedly shifting the angle of vision. After 1912
Gris composed with areas of strong local color without
involving himself in the modulating effects of light. And
lastly, Gris used black as a constituent element, often
evoking some part of an object through its negative sil-
houette.
Gris'sfirst big group of cubist paintings (1911-1913) are
therefore bolder, less dependent on the nuances of fine
painting, more assertive and visually legible than com-
parable works by Braque and Picasso. They are methodi-

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Harlequinwith Guitar,1917, by Gris.Oil on wood
panel, 391/4 x 251/2 inches. The Alex Hillman Family
Foundation,New York
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cally thought out ratherthan empirical and imaginative. But they
are truly cubist in spirit: Gris, like Braque and Picasso, was con-
cerned with giving as accurate and complete a representation
as possible of tangible reality as we know it intellectually to be.
Gris's approach to painting differed from that of Braque and
Picasso in that his was a more scientific type of mind, depending
on analysis and reasoning ratherthan instinct. And this approach
had been encouraged by his early training in the methods of
science and engineering. Moreover, after 1914 it found expres-
sion through his method of first drawing in a formal composition,
based on a predetermined division of the canvas into a har-
monious arrangement of colored forms that he himself referred
to as "flat, colored architecture." This procedure first became
evident when Gris began to work with pasted papers, because
he would cut these to the required shapes and then paste them
together as an overall design before giving them objective mean-
ing by overdrawing, by adding representational details, and by
introducing chiaroscuro to create volume and separate one plane
from another.
Now it was in this second stage that Gris, who did not hesitate
to seek help from mathematical calculations at the start, proved
he was not the victim of any theory or geometrical formula. For
whenever Gris felt that he must modify, even transform, the
colored elements of his basic composition to keep from distort-
ing the reality of the objects and the spatial relationships be-
tween them, he did so. Thus Gris's pictures convey visually con-
vincing images of reality because he knew how to temper science
with intuition. Gris's cubist works are more constructed, more
absolute, more solemn and intense, artisticallyless free and fanci-
ful than those of Braqueand Picasso, but because of the interven-
tion of his sensibility they are not coldly intellectual or schematic.
And this becomes increasingly evident after 1915, when Gris,
like Braqueand Picasso, set about extending the expressive possi-
bilities of his style and began to cultivate the sort of sensitive
and sensuous element in his pictures that he had discovered in
works of the Frenchschool by artists like Fouquet, Louis Le Nain,
and Boucher, as well as the school of Fontainebleau.
Having said this, it is impossible not to go on to discuss the
more active role that this compensatory side of his nature-the
lyrical as opposed to the intellectual, the sensuous as opposed to
the severe -began to play in Juan Gris's conception of painting
from 1920 onward. Right from the start Gris had accommodated
his feeling for sensuous values not only in the richness of his
color but also in his subtle differentiations of texture. However,
at this early stage, when he was primarilyconcerned with prob-
lems of composition, of pictorial form, and with establishing his
pictorial grasp on reality, Gris gave precedence to his sense of
"flat, colored architecture" and subjected his lyrical instincts to
Still Lifew'ith a Guitar,1913, by Gris.Watercolorand
charcoal,.255/8x 187/4inches. Privatecollection,
New York Photograph:Taylor& Dull

Still Life,1917, by Gris.Oil on wood panel, 29 x 36

inches. The MinneapolisInstituteof Arts,Minneapolis,
Minnesota,The John R. Van Derlip Fund,51.20

Still Life,1920, by Gris.Oil on canvas,283/4x 367/8

inches. RijksmuseumKroller-Muller,Otterlo

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 an overriding classical discipline. After 1920, however, Gris relaxed this con-
ception because he was ready to adopt a much freer, more rhythmic, less
abstract style. He then allowed his geometrical calculations to become a
scarcely visible, underlying structure beneath a looser style of representation
involving an inventive and freely flowing use of line. No longer did he want
his compositional elements visibly to coincide with the forms of natural
objects. Instead, geometry became a semitransparent base over which he
could freely inscribe the shapes and constituent elements of the subject he
wanted to represent. Thus he could establish a varying linear surface rhythm
and bring objects into a new and, so to speak, "rhyming" relationship with
each other by creating formal analogies between them. The result was that
Gris'spainting became more lyricalthan before, but also more legible. Indeed,
he himself said that his post-war work was to his earlier work as poetry is to
prose.
Gris's later painting has never found favor in American eyes, and it must
be admitted that much of the work he did in 1922-1923, a transitional period,
is weaker and less profound than anything he had painted before 1921. But
between 1924 and his death in May 1927, Gris found a new stylistic strength
and pictorial equilibrium, so that while the forms in his pictures are more
precise and the geometrical element is more evident, the formal "rhymes"and
linear rhythms lose nothing of their lyrical inspiration.Thus one half of Gris's
work complements and completes the other, and it is a mistake to attribute
his change of style to weakness or loss of inspiration.

Le Canigou, 1921, by Gris. Oil on canvas, 257/2 x 391/2

inches. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

362

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