Juan Gris

1887-1927 • Spanish • Painter • Cubist

"I try to make concrete the abstract … Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I make a bottle-a particular bottle-out of a cylinder." - Gris

A fellow Spaniard, Gris joined PICASSO's circle in Montmartre. His innovations in CUBISM were also very important; one step he took was to combine the variegated, complex, faceted Cubist views with the traditional PERSPECTIVE of the ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. This is apparent in a painting such as La Place Ravigna1l, Still Life in Front of an Open Window (1915). Planes representing the objects in front of the window are sliced, tilted, and overlaid on each other in a typical Cubist manner, yet the street scene "outside" the window is seen without ambiguity, from a single point of view. At the same time, Gris confounds inside outside by continuing elements from the street (window shutters, a lamppost) on the interior walls of the room. Of the Cubists, Gris seems-albeit unintentionally-most prescient of the irony and indeterminacy of POST MODERN thought