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| Juan Gris |
Today is the 125th birthday
of a Spanish painter and sculptor Juan Gris (March
23, 1887 – May 11, 1927), who lived and worked in France most of his life. His
works, which are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic
genre—Cubism—are among the movement's most distinctive. Presenting a short note
on his life and work : Being Poet
Juan Gris born in Madrid. Gris
studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid
from 1902 to 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local
periodicals. From 1904 to 1905 he studied painting with the academic artist
José Maria Carbonero. In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri
Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and in 1915 was painted by his friend,
Amedeo Modigliani. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and
fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. His portrait of Picasso in 1912 is a
significant early Cubist painting done by a painter other than Picasso or
Georges Braque. (Although he regarded Picasso as a teacher, Gertrude Stein
acknowledged that Gris "was the one person that Picasso would have
willingly wiped off the map.")
Although he submitted darkly humorous illustrations to
journals such as Le Rire, L'assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de
Paris, Gris began to paint seriously in 1910. By 1912 he had developed a
personal Cubist style. At first Gris painted in the analytic style of Cubism,
but after 1913 he began his conversion to synthetic Cubism, of which he became
a steadfast interpreter, with extensive use of papier collé. Unlike Picasso and
Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris painted with bright
harmonious colors in daring, novel combinations in the manner of his friend
Matisse.
In 1924, he first designed ballet sets and costumes
for Sergei Diaghilev and the famous Ballets Russes. Gris articulated most of
his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive
lecture, Des possibilites de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris
exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim
in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Dusseldorf in 1925. He died
in Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris) in the spring of 1927 at the age of forty,
leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges. Before 2005, a Gris painting sold
for more than USD69 million.
(Source : www.juangris.org)
