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Lot Essay
It was following a lecture given in Zurich in the early-1940s by Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer par excellence of the Cubist generation, that Georg and Josi Guggenheim fell under the spell of Gris' art. The present work, painted in 1925, during a period in the last few years of Gris' life which Kahnweiler considered the most fruitful and beautiful of the artist's career, Le raisin is a carefully constructed still-life replete with formal fluency underpinned by a sturdy geometry.
In assessing Gris' painting in the last few years of his life Kahnweiler wrote: '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 coloured architecture" of which he talked. Everything was restored to the flat surface... 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' (in Juan Gris, His Life and Work, London, 1969, pp. 129-130).
In assessing Gris' painting in the last few years of his life Kahnweiler wrote: '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 coloured architecture" of which he talked. Everything was restored to the flat surface... 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' (in Juan Gris, His Life and Work, London, 1969, pp. 129-130).