JUAN GRIS 1887-1927

Juan Gris was born in Madrid and went to Paris in 1906, where he became a friend of Picasso. He developed his own style of Cubism, which he maintained until the end of his short life. He was very interested in composition and his paintings are beautifully constructed, calm and poetic.

Paris in the first half of the 20th century was a magnet for artists from all over the world, drawn there by a ferment of new artistic ideas. The art movements which flourished there - Impressionism in the 19th century, then post-Impressionist Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism - were based on new ideas about human beings and the world. Psychoanalysis and Freud’s writing about the unconscious influenced artists to use jokes and strange images of dreams; the development of photography and new mathematics and physics inspired them to invent new ways of depicting the world. They produced works of art which make people ponder before they can recognise what they are looking at.

Artists began exploring areas of life which had not previously seemed accessible to art. One reason for this was photography, which had been invented in the mid-19th century sending a wave of anxiety through the artistic professions. For hundreds of years, the job of a European artist had been to show the world its stories and legends as realistically as possible. Then with the click of a camera the artist seemed to have been made redundant. Still more inventions, including moving pictures, the motor car and the aeroplane, offered new views of the visible world; artists realised that if they wanted to keep their profession alive they too would have to do some inventing.

So they started to explore those areas where photography cannot go. Here is an interesting question for pupils of any age. What can art describe that photography cannot? Dreams, jokes, feelings, perhaps. The subject matter of art widened, moving away from naturalistic representation. Following on from Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who used savagely intense colour, Fauvists (the name comes from the French for “wild beast”) such as Henri Matisse used colour for its emotional force, in semi-abstract compositions. Expressionists such as Georges Rouault used similar colour but with harsher outlines and stronger drawing. Surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp, who famously put a urinal in a gallery, and Salvador Dal!, relished absurd and dramatic juxtapositions. Photographs, on the other hand, recorded only appearances.

We take photographs standing in one spot because moving blurs the picture. This means that in a photograph we can show things from only one viewpoint. Painters had also thought they could only show the world from one viewpoint, but at the beginning of the 20th century the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and his French friend Georges Braque (1882-1963) had the idea that a painting could offer something different from a photograph if it could show things from more than one point of view.

Multiple viewpoints had been explored in the paintings of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Picasso took this breaking up of images further, influenced by the power of African sculptures which he had stumbled on by chance in a museum. He realised that the African artists had not intended to show their subjects realistically but had distorted and simplified. Braque added some of the relativism current in maths and physics.

Their great invention was Cubism, given its name as the objects in the paintings often looked as if they had been built from cubes. Cubism set out to try to show a subject from more than one viewpoint in the same painting. If pupils imagine some pieces of mirror arranged close together, they can picture how the pieces might reflect different views of say, a violin and a table. The Cubist painters were not doing exactly this, but it gives an idea of why there are so many straight edges in their work. It helped to have a straight edge to indicate where one view ended and the next began.

“Man in a Cafe”, by Juan Gris, shows how another Spanish artist took up the Cubist language and made it his own. In 1912, when this picture was painted, young, impoverished artists could find the cheap accommodation and the night life that they required in the Parisian quarter of Montmartre.

The narrow streets that twisted down from the gleaming white church of the Sacred Heart were suitably non middle class. Artists sat in the cheap cafes reading papers, talking about everything under the sun and drinking coffee, beer, and, until it was banned, absinthe (an extremely potent and very cheap green drink). Someone would play the guitar and they would argue about new ideas, then go back to their studios to paint or sculpt.

Gris’ painting shows a man in one of these cafes. Pupils might think about what in the painting tells us the man is sitting in a cafe. Is he a poor man or a smart gentleman? How can we tell? Is he looking at us? What might he say if he saw us staring at him? Ask them to describe his expression. Why is his face composed of more shapes than any other part of the painting? Is the artist showing different viewpoints? Are faces more complicated than other shapes? Which parts of his face can we see? Can we see the man’s left hand? What is it doing? Can we see the fingers? Are they realistic, or are we picking up clues (colour, number of finger-like shapes, a possible thumb)? Are there two left hands? Or what might the brown “fingers” be? (Cigars in a box on the table?) What sort of hat is the man wearing? What is his right hand resting on? (a piano?) Can we see the striped cafe awning? What can we see through the window? Why might the edges of the shapes which compose his black suit be shaded in white?

The Shock of the New. Art and the Century of Change. By Robert Hughes. Thames and Hudson Price: pound;19.95Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 catalogue to the exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts Price: pound;24.95.Annie Harris is head of education at the Royal Academy of Arts