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拍品專文
Juan Gris began to adopt a more fluid, lyrical style of painting in late 1919, stepping away from the cool geometry of the synthetic style of Cubism that had prevailed during the War years, and instead embracing a more sensuous approach to form in his still-life compositions. In a letter to his close friend and former dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, Gris declared: ‘I think that at last I am entering a period of realisation… I have also managed to rid my painting of 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’ (letter to D.-H. Kahnweiler, 25 August 1919; D. Cooper, ed., Letters of Juan Gris, 1956, LXXX, p. 66). The artist’s increased confidence and the lucidity of his compositional structures were immediately evident to Kahnweiler upon his return to Paris in 1920 – encountering Gris’s latest paintings, he noted: ‘I had left behind a young painter whose works I liked. I had returned to find a master’ (Juan Gris, His Life and Work, trans. by D. Cooper, London, 1947, p. 16).
Painted in August 1921 and formerly in the collection of the Cubist scholar, connoisseur and leading authority on Gris’s work, Douglas Cooper, Guitare et compotier exemplifies the refined elegance and purity of the artist’s paintings from this period of his career. Composed of a small collection of Gris’s favourite motifs – a guitar, sheets of music, a shallow bowl filled with grapes and a pear, set atop a table in a simple interior – the painting is imbued with an intriguing sense of rhythm, each element arranged and positioned to generate a balanced whole. A sophisticated series of visual rhymes underpin the composition, as Gris repeats certain forms and shapes in a manner that unites and connects the various objects to one another. Here, the fluid, undulating contour of the body of the guitar is echoed in the shape of the tablecloth as it flows around the objects, as well as the profile of the bowl of fruit, while the graphic lines of the sheet music find correspondence in the strings of the guitar and the detailing of the frame in the background. In this way, Gris allows certain shapes and lines to reverberate through the composition, creating a refined, poetic pattern of relationships that elevates these familiar, quotidian objects.
This rhyming effect continues in the interplay of colour, as passages of cool blue are contrasted against warm, reddish browns and deep blacks in a carefully planned arrangement that does not correspond to the contours of the various elements, but rather seems to be deployed with the sole purpose of generating a sense of symmetry. The inherent harmony of Guitare et compotier is further enhanced by the artist’s use of light and shadow as independent compositional elements within the scene, influenced, perhaps, by the dramatic chiaroscuro in Baroque still-life paintings of his Spanish predecessors. In the present work, there is almost a spotlight shining on a section of the guitar, highlighting the faux-bois finish of the wooden instrument. The remainder of its details disappear in shadow, the rest of the surface denoted by flat planes of black pigment, which are once again mirrored in the play of tones in the fruit bowl.
In this way, the painting illustrates the manner in which Gris was now actively working from the abstract to the concrete in his compositions – wishing to avoid merely recording his sensations, he sought a more lyrical synthesis, which he felt aligned him to the art of the Old Masters. ‘I work with the elements of the intellect, with the imagination. I try to make concrete that which is abstract,’ he explained. ’I proceed from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I start with an abstraction in order to arrive at a true fact. Mine is an art of synthesis... Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, 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… The painting is to the other what poetry is to prose. Though in my system I may depart greatly from any form of idealistic or naturalistic art, in practice I cannot break away from the Louvre. Mine is the method of all times… there are technical means and they remain constant’ (quoted in L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 5, Paris 1921; reproduced in ibid., p. 138).
Painted in August 1921 and formerly in the collection of the Cubist scholar, connoisseur and leading authority on Gris’s work, Douglas Cooper, Guitare et compotier exemplifies the refined elegance and purity of the artist’s paintings from this period of his career. Composed of a small collection of Gris’s favourite motifs – a guitar, sheets of music, a shallow bowl filled with grapes and a pear, set atop a table in a simple interior – the painting is imbued with an intriguing sense of rhythm, each element arranged and positioned to generate a balanced whole. A sophisticated series of visual rhymes underpin the composition, as Gris repeats certain forms and shapes in a manner that unites and connects the various objects to one another. Here, the fluid, undulating contour of the body of the guitar is echoed in the shape of the tablecloth as it flows around the objects, as well as the profile of the bowl of fruit, while the graphic lines of the sheet music find correspondence in the strings of the guitar and the detailing of the frame in the background. In this way, Gris allows certain shapes and lines to reverberate through the composition, creating a refined, poetic pattern of relationships that elevates these familiar, quotidian objects.
This rhyming effect continues in the interplay of colour, as passages of cool blue are contrasted against warm, reddish browns and deep blacks in a carefully planned arrangement that does not correspond to the contours of the various elements, but rather seems to be deployed with the sole purpose of generating a sense of symmetry. The inherent harmony of Guitare et compotier is further enhanced by the artist’s use of light and shadow as independent compositional elements within the scene, influenced, perhaps, by the dramatic chiaroscuro in Baroque still-life paintings of his Spanish predecessors. In the present work, there is almost a spotlight shining on a section of the guitar, highlighting the faux-bois finish of the wooden instrument. The remainder of its details disappear in shadow, the rest of the surface denoted by flat planes of black pigment, which are once again mirrored in the play of tones in the fruit bowl.
In this way, the painting illustrates the manner in which Gris was now actively working from the abstract to the concrete in his compositions – wishing to avoid merely recording his sensations, he sought a more lyrical synthesis, which he felt aligned him to the art of the Old Masters. ‘I work with the elements of the intellect, with the imagination. I try to make concrete that which is abstract,’ he explained. ’I proceed from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I start with an abstraction in order to arrive at a true fact. Mine is an art of synthesis... Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, 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… The painting is to the other what poetry is to prose. Though in my system I may depart greatly from any form of idealistic or naturalistic art, in practice I cannot break away from the Louvre. Mine is the method of all times… there are technical means and they remain constant’ (quoted in L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 5, Paris 1921; reproduced in ibid., p. 138).