the cubists

  Juan Gris had made a very close study of Cubist painting as it was practised by Picasso and Braque, and he certainly knew the painting of 1909-1910 in which Braque had introduced a trompe-l’oeil nail in what was otherwise a purely Analytical Cubist pictue. In Violin and Engraving Gris not only painted in a nail of this sort but he pasted part of a real engraving into the frame in the upper right half of the picture. He also introduced Braque’s favorite subject matter, the violin, while keeping to his own compositional device of building up the picture in terms of tall, vertical strips offset by sharply pointed triangular forms. By 1913 Gris was dividing his canvas into vertical strips, within which the fragmented subject matter was allowed not only to slide up and down, as suited the composition best, but to be shown alternately in a naturalistic way and in notional form, as an outline drawn on a ground of flat color. Gris had also developed a voluptuous textural sense which delighted in the juxtaposition of many different kinds of surface, from simulated marble to the smoothness of a real playing card, and from patterned wallpaper to the rich, painterly substance of the foaming beer.

January 1, 2010. Uncategorized.