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Lot Essay
Through the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris became acquainted with a diverse and eclectic social circle which included noteable figures of the bourgeois intelligentsia and the new bohemians. These were old friends like Max Jacob from his Montmartre days and habitues of the Left bank such as Michel Leiris, Armand Salacour and André Masson. Many of these individuals figure in his portraits from 1922-1927. Gris' bourgeois figure-types connect with his experience just as the peasant-figures, the portraits and the caracture figures had earlier, yet in the artifice prevails over substance much more plainly. "The bourgeois figures of the mid-1920s, like the Pierrots and Harlequins after 1917 and the females in stage costumes of the very last figure-paintings, can be read, then, as yet further assertions of the 'purity' of painting, the artifice of art" (C. Green, "Figures of Artifice and Substance," Juan Gris, exh. cat., The Whitechaple Gallery, London, 1992, p. 139).
In assessing Gris' painting from the period 1920-1926 Kahnweiler wrote: "I even wonder whether the fact that these admirers are less enthusiastic about his work...is not due to an old misunderstanding of Cubism. Just as in 1908 the name "Cubist" was first used in the erroneous belief that the pictures of that time consisted of geometrical forms...so with Gris it seems that only the period before 1920, with its harder lines and more pronounced angles, is considered by some people authentically Cubist. Far be it from me to deny either the severe grandeur, the impressive plastic solidity of Gris' canvases during these four years, or the increasing lucidity of his thought. From the purely technical point of view it was certainly the most rigorous period of his life. Stately and firm, his paintings had become the 'flat colored architecture' of which he talked. Everything was restored to the flat surface...Line and color were more closely associated...During these few years Gris came very near the pole of 'unity'. The form of the work mattered more to him than the detail of his emotion. The objects which he created are no longer those we meet with on a given day at a given time; they have been raised to the dignity of the type, redeemed from particular fortuities...These figures and objects remind one of the Platonist 'idea'...These pictures have all the characteristics of classical art. Gris revealed himself at this time as a classical painter: lucidity, purity, the preponderance of the work of art itself, the predominance of the general, the static quality, all the symptoms are there. He is classical too in the way he subordinates his emotion to the work in which it is expressed" (D.-H. Kahnweiler, op.cit., pp. 129-130).
In notes to Carl Einstein that were published in the summer of 1923, Gris commented: "The world from which I draw the elements of reality is not visual but imaginative. Though the way of looking at the world and the concentration of certain of its aspects-that is to say, the aesthetic-has varied from period to period, the relationship of one colored form to another-that is to say, the technique--has always, so to speak, remained fixed. I therefore believe that my technique is classical, for I have learnt it from the masters of the past" (quoted in ibid., p. 194).
In assessing Gris' painting from the period 1920-1926 Kahnweiler wrote: "I even wonder whether the fact that these admirers are less enthusiastic about his work...is not due to an old misunderstanding of Cubism. Just as in 1908 the name "Cubist" was first used in the erroneous belief that the pictures of that time consisted of geometrical forms...so with Gris it seems that only the period before 1920, with its harder lines and more pronounced angles, is considered by some people authentically Cubist. Far be it from me to deny either the severe grandeur, the impressive plastic solidity of Gris' canvases during these four years, or the increasing lucidity of his thought. From the purely technical point of view it was certainly the most rigorous period of his life. Stately and firm, his paintings had become the 'flat colored architecture' of which he talked. Everything was restored to the flat surface...Line and color were more closely associated...During these few years Gris came very near the pole of 'unity'. The form of the work mattered more to him than the detail of his emotion. The objects which he created are no longer those we meet with on a given day at a given time; they have been raised to the dignity of the type, redeemed from particular fortuities...These figures and objects remind one of the Platonist 'idea'...These pictures have all the characteristics of classical art. Gris revealed himself at this time as a classical painter: lucidity, purity, the preponderance of the work of art itself, the predominance of the general, the static quality, all the symptoms are there. He is classical too in the way he subordinates his emotion to the work in which it is expressed" (D.-H. Kahnweiler, op.cit., pp. 129-130).
In notes to Carl Einstein that were published in the summer of 1923, Gris commented: "The world from which I draw the elements of reality is not visual but imaginative. Though the way of looking at the world and the concentration of certain of its aspects-that is to say, the aesthetic-has varied from period to period, the relationship of one colored form to another-that is to say, the technique--has always, so to speak, remained fixed. I therefore believe that my technique is classical, for I have learnt it from the masters of the past" (quoted in ibid., p. 194).