Spanish Cubist Artist Juan Gris (1887-1927) was born in Madrid, with his original name Jose Victoriano Gonzalez. Gris was one of the lead artists in the cubist movement. As a painter, Gris was part of the ‘School of Paris’ (Ecole de Paris) -movement. Gris’s subject-matter was always his immediate surroundings: he produced still lifes composed of simple, everyday objects, portraits of friends, and occasionally landscapes or cityscapes.
Biography Juan Gris
A highly intelligent man, Juan Gris initially went to study engineering in Madrid in 1902. Then in about 1904, he switched to painting. Two years later, in 1906 Juan Gris left Madrid as it was too provincial at that time, and moved to Paris. Gris adopted the pseudonym by which he is known today after moving (1906) to Paris.
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In Paris, Gris met fellow-country man Pablo Picasso, whose lead he followed. They lived in the same building and became friends. In Paris Gris also befriended Georges Braque, another cubist, as well as Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and Amedeo Modigliani.
In the early stages of his career, Juan Gris earned his living by providing humorous drawings to L’Assiette au Beurre, Le Temoin and other illustrated papers. Gris began to paint seriously in 1910. Between 1907 and 1912 he watched closely the development of the cubist style.
Gris participated from 1912 in the Cubist movement, his work being noted for its classical purity and lucidity. Gris exhibited at the Section d’Or 1912 and was subsequently offered a contract with Kahnweiler.
In 1912 Gris exhibited his ‘Homage to Picasso’, which established his reputation as a painter of the first rank. He worked closely with Picasso and Braque until the outbreak of World War I, molding their intuitively generated innovative approach with his own, more methodical taste. Picasso, Braque and Gris formed really the three musqueteers of Cubism, with Picasso & Braque being the founders, and Gris the most gifted developer of this genre.
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Typical of his approach was his remark about Cezanne, the universally acknowledged father of Cubism:
‘Cezanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle out of a cylinder.’
Juan Gris was an influential artist of the Section d’Or (the cubists), who also inspired other Ecole de Paris- artists such as Matisse.
Grist embraced collage as soon as Picasso & Braque had invented it, and made paper collages from 1913 to 15. Then he evolved into a more synthetic style, ‘a flat pictorial architecture’.
Gris had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Paris, 1919. Designed sets and costumes for Les Tentations de la Bergere and other Diaghilev productions from 1921 to 1924. In the ’20s, Gris designed costumes and scenery for Serge DIAGHILEV’s Ballets Russes.
At that time, Juan Gris also completed some of the boldest and most mature statements of his cubist style, with landscape-still lifes that compress interiors and exteriors into synthetic cubist compositions and figure paintings, especially the fine series of clowns.
Settled at Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1922, but spent most winters in the South of France. First illness 1920; increasing ill-health from 1925. Died at Boulogne-sur-Seine.
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