Lot Essay
The Spanish artist Juan Gris has a singular place in the history of Cubism in France. An intimate member of Picasso's circle of friends, which included Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, Maurice Reynal, Marie Laurencin and, most importantly for his development as a painter, Georges Braque, Gris was also closely linked to the "public" or "salon" Cubists: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. In 1912 he made his public debut with the latter group at the Salon des Indépendants, exhibiting a Cubist-inspired Hommage à Pablo Picasso (Cooper, no. 13; Art Institute of Chicago). Later that year he participated in the exhibition of the Section d'or and was dubbed by Apollinaire the "demon of logic."
Unlike the individual members of the salon group, Gris was in a unique position to observe first-hand the development of Cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque. Shortly after emigrating to Paris from his native Madrid in September, 1906, he was introduced to Picasso and through his Spanish colleague was able to secure a basement studio in the famous Bateau Lavoir (fig. 1), where Picasso had resided since 1904. Over the next six years, until he signed a contract in 1912 with Picasso's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Gris earned his living as an illustrator, publishing his drawings in Spanish and French satirical magazines (Papitu, Blanco y Negro, Le Rire, Le Témoin, Cri de Paris, Le Charivari, L'Assiette au Beurre). Although he did not begin painting in a Cubist style until 1911, Gris was a witness to the development of Cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque.
It therefore comes as no surprise that by 1912-1913, just three years into his career as a painter, Gris produced works of great depth and maturity. John Golding has described Gris's progress by 1913:
While Picasso and Braque were moving, largely under the influence
of papier collé, towards a flatter, simpler and more decorative kind of painting, Gris's work was becoming increasingly complex and more refined. Gris, who had always been an original painter, had during 1912 asserted himself as an important influence on the minor figures of the Cubist movement. Now, in 1913, he was executing works which match the contemporary paintings of Picasso and Braque in quality and invention. Gris began to use pieces of papier collé in his paintings during 1913, and this naturally conditioned the appearance of his work, but there is not the same fundamental change in his style at this time as there was in the case of Picasso and Braque, who were both deeply influenced in all their work not only by the appearance of papier collé but also by the new pictorial techniques which it involved. Gris's work of 1913 shows a steady progression towards an increasingly accomplished and commanding kind of painting. (J. Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pp. 134-135)
Executed over the course of December, 1913 and January, 1914, Le jacquet is the work of an agile and innovative painter in full possession of his métier. On a studio tabletop covered by a lavender tablecloth Gris has assembled the mundane protagonists of an intense pictorial drama: a backgammon board positioned close to the center of the composition, its framing edges restating those of the canvas; a container for rolling dice; two playing cards (a club and a heart); a newspaper identified by the masthead "LE J[ournal]"; and a violin whose elegant neck forms a sweeping diagonal that carries the viewer's eye from the lower right-hand corner of the composition to the upper left-hand corner. The space of the painting is radically abridged as Gris appears to rotate the tabletop almost ninety degrees, parallel to the surface of the canvas. In contrast, the artist has maintained a rudimentary system of modeling to represent the dice, the side of the backgammon game board, and the container. Along the bottom edges of the table, however, the function of Gris's line alternates between that of contour and shading, as the artist engages in a highly complex play of spatial illusions and ambiguities. Indeed, the faux-bois treatment of the background plane, a technique Braque had pioneered in 1912, at once signifies the wood grain of the tabletop and that of the violin, thereby collapsing the boundaries between objects and undermining the conventional relationship of figure to ground.
In his monograph on the painter, Kahnweiler describes Gris's working methods:
...objects are often represented several times in his pictures, as in those of his friends; but the method peculiar to Gris was the
arrangement of the supplementary views of the several objects in a second picture (often placed obliquely) which is integrated with the first. Generally speaking, the first view shows them at an
angle. The painter has combined the two architectures, the second being superimposed on the first, and they melt into each other in the unity of the picture. (D.-H. Kahnweiler, op. cit., pp. 120-121)
Although Kahnweiler's description may appear categorical to some viewers, since the "architecture" about which he speaks is anything but systematic in the sense of configuring a dual perspective, it does point to the artist's compositional rigor. This emerges with particular clarity in Gris's drawings of the period, few of which have survived. In Verre et damier of 1913 (fig. 2), the artist constructs his composition as a series of interpenetrating planes and carefully delineated orthogonals. With the precision of a master draughtsman, Gris aligns the rim of the glass with the edge of a diagonal plane, anchoring the object in the center of the composition. But Gris's approach remains highly intuitive: lines are drawn with a ruler and by hand; shading appears arbitrary; and the artist manipulates the effects of light and dark by applying the stylus of his pencil and charcoal to the paper with varying degrees of pressure. As Golding observes:
...Gris has used a series of unrelated, arbitrary, angular and
modular relationships and proportions to carry out his Cubist
analysis of volumes with a feeling of greater explicitness and
exactitude... In all the drawings there are free-hand lines (as
opposed to the majority of lines which are drawn with rulers and compasses) which have been put down in a purely intuitive way and which do not fit into any kind of mathematical scheme. (J. Golding, op. cit., p. 136)
Moreover, Gris's brilliant, at times dissonant, palette produces additional dramatic effects. In Le jacquet Gris carefully stages an opposition between red and green on the one hand, and lavender and yellow on the other. The progression from yellow to green to blue in the center of the painting serves less to mediate these oppositions than to establish yet another axis of meaning as a whole. Christopher Green aptly describes the tension beneath Gris's apparent control and clarity:
Far from minimizing conflict, the sheer clarity of Gris's practice could be and was used to accentuate contradiction... If Gris's
pictures repeatedly signify clarity and control, and should have
been seen to possess logic, what they said about logic was never
very straightforward. (C. Green, Juan Gris, New Haven, 1992, p. 43)
Finally, it is important to take note of thematic play in Gris's work, a dimension of his painting that has not been sufficiently emphasized. Le jacquet belongs to a group of paintings of 1913-1914, including La chope de bière et les cartes (fig. 3), Le Bock (fig. 4), and Violin et damier (fig. 5), in which gameboards and/or playing cards are represented. As Mark Rosenthal has observed in response to Violin et damier:
Gris's rhyming is not only formal but thematic. The violin is
shown caught in an interplay between its commonplace appearance
and a manipulated state of being. Moreover, one "plays" not only
the violin but the checkers and the dice. The sheet music and
checkerboard are conceptually alike; each is the terrain or map of a sequence of played actions. Such is Gris's wit integrated into
his formal manipulations. But, also, the violin is a metaphor for artistic activity while, by contrast, the checkerboard evokes life experience. (M. Rosenthal, Juan Gris, New York, 1983, p. 50)
In Le jacquet Gris appears to extend these metaphors as he meditated on the game of life itself. For backgammon is both a game of chance and a game of strategy; an agile player will turn an unfortunate roll of the dice to his advantage. In this reading, the presence of the newspaper may point to events outside the space of the picture, but LE J[ournal] might also be read as LE J[eu] -- "the game" -- in the dual sense of Gris's high-stakes visual theatrics and the unpredictability of life itself. And what of the two playing cards? They appear in contemporary works by Picasso and Braque and may well have symbolic meaning. Do they represent Gris's private meditation on life and the senses -- the club sign his trump card and the heart a symbol of his love for Josette Herpin, his companion?
Le jacquet was one of the works which the French state seized from Kahnweiler, a German citizen, with the outbreak of World War I. It was later acquired by Kahnweiler at the sale of his sequestered stock in 1921 and entered the collection of his new Galerie Simon. The painting subsequently passed to the Galerie Louise Leiris. Louise Godon Leiris had been Kahnweiler's assistant at the Galerie Simon. She assumed control of his business in 1940, at which time she changed the name of the gallery. Gris executed two sensitive line drawings of Kahnweiler (fig. 5) and Leiris in 1921.
(fig. 1) Juan Gris and Josette Herpin in the artist's Bateau Lavoir studio, 1922
(Photo by D.-H. Kahnweiler)
(fig. 2) Juan Gris, Verre et damier, 1913
Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
(fig. 3) Juan Gris, La chope de bière et les cartes, 1913
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (Gift of Ferdinand Howald)
(fig. 4) Juan Gris, Le bock, 1913
Private Collection, Stockholm
(fig. 5) Juan Gris, Violin et damier, 1913
Private Collection, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 6) Juan Gris, Portrait de Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1921
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (Gift of Louise and Michel Leiris)
Unlike the individual members of the salon group, Gris was in a unique position to observe first-hand the development of Cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque. Shortly after emigrating to Paris from his native Madrid in September, 1906, he was introduced to Picasso and through his Spanish colleague was able to secure a basement studio in the famous Bateau Lavoir (fig. 1), where Picasso had resided since 1904. Over the next six years, until he signed a contract in 1912 with Picasso's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Gris earned his living as an illustrator, publishing his drawings in Spanish and French satirical magazines (Papitu, Blanco y Negro, Le Rire, Le Témoin, Cri de Paris, Le Charivari, L'Assiette au Beurre). Although he did not begin painting in a Cubist style until 1911, Gris was a witness to the development of Cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque.
It therefore comes as no surprise that by 1912-1913, just three years into his career as a painter, Gris produced works of great depth and maturity. John Golding has described Gris's progress by 1913:
While Picasso and Braque were moving, largely under the influence
of papier collé, towards a flatter, simpler and more decorative kind of painting, Gris's work was becoming increasingly complex and more refined. Gris, who had always been an original painter, had during 1912 asserted himself as an important influence on the minor figures of the Cubist movement. Now, in 1913, he was executing works which match the contemporary paintings of Picasso and Braque in quality and invention. Gris began to use pieces of papier collé in his paintings during 1913, and this naturally conditioned the appearance of his work, but there is not the same fundamental change in his style at this time as there was in the case of Picasso and Braque, who were both deeply influenced in all their work not only by the appearance of papier collé but also by the new pictorial techniques which it involved. Gris's work of 1913 shows a steady progression towards an increasingly accomplished and commanding kind of painting. (J. Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pp. 134-135)
Executed over the course of December, 1913 and January, 1914, Le jacquet is the work of an agile and innovative painter in full possession of his métier. On a studio tabletop covered by a lavender tablecloth Gris has assembled the mundane protagonists of an intense pictorial drama: a backgammon board positioned close to the center of the composition, its framing edges restating those of the canvas; a container for rolling dice; two playing cards (a club and a heart); a newspaper identified by the masthead "LE J[ournal]"; and a violin whose elegant neck forms a sweeping diagonal that carries the viewer's eye from the lower right-hand corner of the composition to the upper left-hand corner. The space of the painting is radically abridged as Gris appears to rotate the tabletop almost ninety degrees, parallel to the surface of the canvas. In contrast, the artist has maintained a rudimentary system of modeling to represent the dice, the side of the backgammon game board, and the container. Along the bottom edges of the table, however, the function of Gris's line alternates between that of contour and shading, as the artist engages in a highly complex play of spatial illusions and ambiguities. Indeed, the faux-bois treatment of the background plane, a technique Braque had pioneered in 1912, at once signifies the wood grain of the tabletop and that of the violin, thereby collapsing the boundaries between objects and undermining the conventional relationship of figure to ground.
In his monograph on the painter, Kahnweiler describes Gris's working methods:
...objects are often represented several times in his pictures, as in those of his friends; but the method peculiar to Gris was the
arrangement of the supplementary views of the several objects in a second picture (often placed obliquely) which is integrated with the first. Generally speaking, the first view shows them at an
angle. The painter has combined the two architectures, the second being superimposed on the first, and they melt into each other in the unity of the picture. (D.-H. Kahnweiler, op. cit., pp. 120-121)
Although Kahnweiler's description may appear categorical to some viewers, since the "architecture" about which he speaks is anything but systematic in the sense of configuring a dual perspective, it does point to the artist's compositional rigor. This emerges with particular clarity in Gris's drawings of the period, few of which have survived. In Verre et damier of 1913 (fig. 2), the artist constructs his composition as a series of interpenetrating planes and carefully delineated orthogonals. With the precision of a master draughtsman, Gris aligns the rim of the glass with the edge of a diagonal plane, anchoring the object in the center of the composition. But Gris's approach remains highly intuitive: lines are drawn with a ruler and by hand; shading appears arbitrary; and the artist manipulates the effects of light and dark by applying the stylus of his pencil and charcoal to the paper with varying degrees of pressure. As Golding observes:
...Gris has used a series of unrelated, arbitrary, angular and
modular relationships and proportions to carry out his Cubist
analysis of volumes with a feeling of greater explicitness and
exactitude... In all the drawings there are free-hand lines (as
opposed to the majority of lines which are drawn with rulers and compasses) which have been put down in a purely intuitive way and which do not fit into any kind of mathematical scheme. (J. Golding, op. cit., p. 136)
Moreover, Gris's brilliant, at times dissonant, palette produces additional dramatic effects. In Le jacquet Gris carefully stages an opposition between red and green on the one hand, and lavender and yellow on the other. The progression from yellow to green to blue in the center of the painting serves less to mediate these oppositions than to establish yet another axis of meaning as a whole. Christopher Green aptly describes the tension beneath Gris's apparent control and clarity:
Far from minimizing conflict, the sheer clarity of Gris's practice could be and was used to accentuate contradiction... If Gris's
pictures repeatedly signify clarity and control, and should have
been seen to possess logic, what they said about logic was never
very straightforward. (C. Green, Juan Gris, New Haven, 1992, p. 43)
Finally, it is important to take note of thematic play in Gris's work, a dimension of his painting that has not been sufficiently emphasized. Le jacquet belongs to a group of paintings of 1913-1914, including La chope de bière et les cartes (fig. 3), Le Bock (fig. 4), and Violin et damier (fig. 5), in which gameboards and/or playing cards are represented. As Mark Rosenthal has observed in response to Violin et damier:
Gris's rhyming is not only formal but thematic. The violin is
shown caught in an interplay between its commonplace appearance
and a manipulated state of being. Moreover, one "plays" not only
the violin but the checkers and the dice. The sheet music and
checkerboard are conceptually alike; each is the terrain or map of a sequence of played actions. Such is Gris's wit integrated into
his formal manipulations. But, also, the violin is a metaphor for artistic activity while, by contrast, the checkerboard evokes life experience. (M. Rosenthal, Juan Gris, New York, 1983, p. 50)
In Le jacquet Gris appears to extend these metaphors as he meditated on the game of life itself. For backgammon is both a game of chance and a game of strategy; an agile player will turn an unfortunate roll of the dice to his advantage. In this reading, the presence of the newspaper may point to events outside the space of the picture, but LE J[ournal] might also be read as LE J[eu] -- "the game" -- in the dual sense of Gris's high-stakes visual theatrics and the unpredictability of life itself. And what of the two playing cards? They appear in contemporary works by Picasso and Braque and may well have symbolic meaning. Do they represent Gris's private meditation on life and the senses -- the club sign his trump card and the heart a symbol of his love for Josette Herpin, his companion?
Le jacquet was one of the works which the French state seized from Kahnweiler, a German citizen, with the outbreak of World War I. It was later acquired by Kahnweiler at the sale of his sequestered stock in 1921 and entered the collection of his new Galerie Simon. The painting subsequently passed to the Galerie Louise Leiris. Louise Godon Leiris had been Kahnweiler's assistant at the Galerie Simon. She assumed control of his business in 1940, at which time she changed the name of the gallery. Gris executed two sensitive line drawings of Kahnweiler (fig. 5) and Leiris in 1921.
(fig. 1) Juan Gris and Josette Herpin in the artist's Bateau Lavoir studio, 1922
(Photo by D.-H. Kahnweiler)
(fig. 2) Juan Gris, Verre et damier, 1913
Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
(fig. 3) Juan Gris, La chope de bière et les cartes, 1913
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (Gift of Ferdinand Howald)
(fig. 4) Juan Gris, Le bock, 1913
Private Collection, Stockholm
(fig. 5) Juan Gris, Violin et damier, 1913
Private Collection, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 6) Juan Gris, Portrait de Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1921
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (Gift of Louise and Michel Leiris)