Juan Gris

Juan Gris (1887-1927), French painter of Spanish birth. Originally named José Vittoriano González, he was born in Madrid and educated there at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas. He left Madrid in 1906 and went to Paris, making the acquaintance of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Gris's first Cubist paintings, generally more calculated than those of Picasso and Braque, appeared in 1912. He spent the next summer in Céret, France, with Picasso, and while there adopted the use of papier collé, shapes cut from paper and glued to the canvas. During World War I he worked in Paris and had his first one-man exhibition there in 1919. From 1922 to 1924 he designed stage sets for two ballets by Sergei Diaghilev, Les tentations de la bergère (The Temptations of the Shepherdess) and La colombe (The Dove), as well as continuing work on his own paintings. After 1925 he worked mainly in gouache and watercolour, and made illustrations for books.

Typical of his cut-paper technique is Glasses and Newspaper (1914, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts). Most of his Cubist paintings are still lifes, including Guitar and Bottle (1917, Philadelphia Museum of Art), The Chessboard (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York), and Guitar and Fruit Dish (1919, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York State).