Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Juan Gris

José Victoriano (Carmelo Carlos) González-Pérez, better known as Juan Gris (1887-1927) built upon the foundations of early Cubism and steered the movement in new directions.

Gris was a Spanish painter and sculptor born in Madrid who lived and worked in France most of his life.

Cubism is an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.

Unlike Picasso and Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris’s chief aim was to please the eye through color.

Often he incorporated newsprint and advertisements into his work, leaving more of the original pieces of ads and newsprint intact, as if to preserve the integrity of the originals. 

Gris’s later works exhibited a greater simplification of geometric structure, a blurring of the distinction between objects and setting, between subject matter and background. 

The clear-cut underlying geometric framework of his work  controls the finer elements of his paintings and their composition, including the small planes of the faces, become part of the unified whole. 

More of Juan Gris‘s wonderful cubism art can be found at http://www.juangris.org/.