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Juan Gris, Cubism's Great Theorist
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10607 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
2,438 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
Unlike the other members of the Cubist movement's tetrarchy--Picasso, Braque, and Leger--Juan Gris (1887-1927) lived a short, relatively sad life plagued by chronic depression and physical illness to which he succumbed at age forty. An exile from his native Spain, Gris struggled economically in France, never achieving the respectability enjoyed by his peers. The mother of his only child left him, and the boy, Georges, grew up in Madrid under the care of Gris' sister. Even when in good health Gris was saturnine and moody. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire recalled of his friend, "He wept romantically instead of laughing as in drinking songs."
As often as writers have told his melancholy story they have linked him with Picasso. Indeed, Gris' art is unthinkable without the elder Spaniard's example. Yet, despite that profound debt, Gris steered his own artistic course with a vision sufficiently unique to situate him among Cubism's elite.
Gris' contribution to the Cubist avant-garde has recently been explored in an exhibition that opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and traveled this spring to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Muller in Otterlo, Netherlands. The exhibition was accompanied by an informative book published by Whitechapel in association with Yale University Press: Juan Gris by Christopher Greene, with contributions by Christian Derouet and Karin von Maur.
Many art critics and historians have commented on Gris' sobriety and devotion to his art, his "transcendental intensity," "mystic purity," and "ascetic mysticism." His is an art devoid of the eroticism of Picasso machismo--Gris did not paint nudes. Absent is the cool composure of the classicist Braque--Gris energized his compositions with swooping diagonals and acid colors. Lacking is the thematic diversity of the socialist Leger--Gris painted still-lifes predominantly, only occasionally figures or landscapes. He sacrificed content in a monklike dedication to his craft. His champion Gertrude Stein said that for Gris "still-life is a religion."
Gris' highly intellectual approach made him the greatest theorist among the Cubist painters. He portrayed the movement as a "natural reaction against the fugitive elements employed by the Impressionists." Cubists sought instead, he once said, to transfix that which "remains in the mind through apprehension and is not continually changing." He was not uncritical of his adopted idiom, especially its early phase, which he saw as "a sort of analysis which was no more painting than the
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