Art: THE CUBIST’S CUBIST

IN a warren of studios and flats known as “the wash house,” at No. 13 Rue Ravignan in Paris, Pablo Picasso in 1907 painted a canvas that was to become historic. Space was carved out in simple planes as if it had been hacked away with an ax. Two figures on the right presented faces as grotesque as African masks. It was the first cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. Almost half a century later, cubism, although short-lived, ranks as one of the most influential movements in art history. To salute its achievements, the Venice Biennale this summer is exhibiting 29 paintings by the purest cubist of them all, Picasso’s friend and countryman, Juan Gris.

Unlike the other cubist greats — Picasso, Braque, and the late Fernand Leger — who had to unlearn their earlier styles, young Juan Gris (pronounced Greece) had had only a rudimentary training in Madrid when he moved into the Rue Ravignan in 1906, to be near Picasso. In on cubism from its birth, Gris developed his own style naturally on cubist tenets.

“As I never consciously and after mature reflection became a cubist,” said Gris, “I have never had to think about it like some one outside the movement.” When he finally tried conventional portraits, he wrote his friend, Art Dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: “It’s fun for me all the time to learn how it is done … I always thought it was far more difficult.”

Instead of exploring reality by re-creating the illusion of space, Gris created a two-dimensional world, used light only for dramatic highlights, reordered objects to make a striking design and rhythm on the canvas. “Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder,” Gris wrote, “but I begin with a cylinder and create an individual of a special type: I make a bottle—a particular bottle—out of a cylinder.”

In the Still Life Gris painted in 1915 (see opposite), he showed a clutter of everyday things —a book, a bottle of Medoc, a newspaper, a table and a view out the window—as they might appear if refracted by a prism. The result is a much more orderly design than the eye could have seen in his drab, poorly furnished room on the Rue Ravignan, but it testifies to the vision that kept Gris painting there. In 1927, when he was only 40, Gris died of uremia. Long afterward, Picasso, studying one of Gris’s paintings, said: “It’s grand to see a painter who knew what he was doing.”