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拍品專文
"My exhibition took place in April last and had a certain amount of success, there were about fifty pictures painted in 1916, 17 and 18. They looked rather well as a group and a lot of people came. Yet, I don't really know how much they liked it, for there is so much admiration for the sheerest mediocrity; people get quite excited about displays of chaos, but no-one likes discipline and clarity. The exaggerations of the Dada movement and others like Picabia make us look classical, though I can't say I mind about that." (Juan Gris in a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, August 25, 1919, cited in; Exh. cat., California, University of Berkeley, Juan Gris, 1984, p. 157)
This remarkable still-life was exhibited by Gris at his ground-breaking exhibition of work at the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in April 1919. Later, as the dedication on the lower left of the painting attests, it was presented to the pioneering owner of the gallery, Léonce Rosenberg, as a souvenir of the show.
Rosenberg had opened his gallery in 1918 where, in addition to Gris, he represented the work of all the major Cubists - Braque, Léger, Picasso, Gleizes, Laurens and Lipchitz. In 1915, Rosenberg had lured Gris away from his close friend and dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and arranged an exclusive contract between Gris and himself. When Kahnweiler returned to Paris after the First World War and reopened his gallery in 1920, he regretted having let Gris sign with Rosenberg in his absence and commented, "I had left behind a young painter whose works I liked. I had returned to find a master." (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler quoted in: D-H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, Paris 1946, p. 16)
During the war years, Gris refined and developed his highly precise and predominantely intellectual approach to the Cubist aesthetic to the point where he had become, in Gertrude Stein's words "the perfect painter". This description, which apparently upset Picasso as it came from what he considered to be his great friend and supporter, was thoroughly appropriate. Of all the Cubists, it was Gris who sought more than any other to perfect Cubism's classical aesthetic. "I would like to continue the tradition of painting with plastic means while bringing it to a new aesthetic based on the intellect", Gris wrote to Kahnweiler, "I think one can quite well take over Chardin's means without taking over either the appearance of his pictures or his conception of reality... ." (Juan Gris quoted in a letter dated August 25, 1919, op. cit)
La table devant le bâtiment, which was probably executed late in 1918, is an outstanding example of Gris' realisation of these aims. Taking as his subject a still-life that rests on a table before a window, which in turn looks out onto a building, Gris has organised and arranged the geometric forms of his images into a carefully constructed whole. The pattern of relationships that Gris orchestrates here form together like a Bach fugue into a unity that, though it defies the conventional laws of time and space, makes perfect sense within the logic of the picture plane. Isolated forms like the newspaper and the bottle merge into one another, yet their simultaneous and independent presence is also clearly delineated with subtly blended colour and sharp angular lines.
Like the best of Gris' Cubist still-lives from late 1918 and 1919, La table devant le bâtiment displays a confidence in its execution that reveals Gris at the height of his powers. Although working to a system, the artist's work was never formulaic. It was constantly developing and intuitively pushing the boundaries of the Cubist aesthetic towards what he hoped at this time would prove to be a new reality. Writing of works like Le table devant le bâtiment which had been shown at Rosenberg's gallery in the 1919 exhibition, Gris declared: "For some time I have been rather pleased with my own work because I think that at last I am entering a period of realisation... I have also managed to rid my painting of a too brutal and descriptive reality. It has so to speak, become more poetic. I hope that ultimately I shall be able to express very precisely, and by means of pure intellectual elements, an imaginary reality. This reality amounts to a sort of painting which is inaccurate but precise, just the opposite of bad painting which is accurate but not precise." (Ibid.)
This remarkable still-life was exhibited by Gris at his ground-breaking exhibition of work at the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in April 1919. Later, as the dedication on the lower left of the painting attests, it was presented to the pioneering owner of the gallery, Léonce Rosenberg, as a souvenir of the show.
Rosenberg had opened his gallery in 1918 where, in addition to Gris, he represented the work of all the major Cubists - Braque, Léger, Picasso, Gleizes, Laurens and Lipchitz. In 1915, Rosenberg had lured Gris away from his close friend and dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and arranged an exclusive contract between Gris and himself. When Kahnweiler returned to Paris after the First World War and reopened his gallery in 1920, he regretted having let Gris sign with Rosenberg in his absence and commented, "I had left behind a young painter whose works I liked. I had returned to find a master." (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler quoted in: D-H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, Paris 1946, p. 16)
During the war years, Gris refined and developed his highly precise and predominantely intellectual approach to the Cubist aesthetic to the point where he had become, in Gertrude Stein's words "the perfect painter". This description, which apparently upset Picasso as it came from what he considered to be his great friend and supporter, was thoroughly appropriate. Of all the Cubists, it was Gris who sought more than any other to perfect Cubism's classical aesthetic. "I would like to continue the tradition of painting with plastic means while bringing it to a new aesthetic based on the intellect", Gris wrote to Kahnweiler, "I think one can quite well take over Chardin's means without taking over either the appearance of his pictures or his conception of reality... ." (Juan Gris quoted in a letter dated August 25, 1919, op. cit)
La table devant le bâtiment, which was probably executed late in 1918, is an outstanding example of Gris' realisation of these aims. Taking as his subject a still-life that rests on a table before a window, which in turn looks out onto a building, Gris has organised and arranged the geometric forms of his images into a carefully constructed whole. The pattern of relationships that Gris orchestrates here form together like a Bach fugue into a unity that, though it defies the conventional laws of time and space, makes perfect sense within the logic of the picture plane. Isolated forms like the newspaper and the bottle merge into one another, yet their simultaneous and independent presence is also clearly delineated with subtly blended colour and sharp angular lines.
Like the best of Gris' Cubist still-lives from late 1918 and 1919, La table devant le bâtiment displays a confidence in its execution that reveals Gris at the height of his powers. Although working to a system, the artist's work was never formulaic. It was constantly developing and intuitively pushing the boundaries of the Cubist aesthetic towards what he hoped at this time would prove to be a new reality. Writing of works like Le table devant le bâtiment which had been shown at Rosenberg's gallery in the 1919 exhibition, Gris declared: "For some time I have been rather pleased with my own work because I think that at last I am entering a period of realisation... I have also managed to rid my painting of a too brutal and descriptive reality. It has so to speak, become more poetic. I hope that ultimately I shall be able to express very precisely, and by means of pure intellectual elements, an imaginary reality. This reality amounts to a sort of painting which is inaccurate but precise, just the opposite of bad painting which is accurate but not precise." (Ibid.)