Juan Gris

Galerie Simon, Paris

Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm

Hermann Gotthardt, Malmö (1977)

Sale: Christie's, London, June 25, 1984, lot 24

Sale: Christie's, New York, November 19, 1986, lot 45

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Simon, Juan Gris, 1923, no. 16

Berlin, Galerie Thannhauser, Erste Sonderausstellung, 1927, no. 123

Douglas Cooper, Juan Gris. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Paris, 1977, vol. II, no. 371, illustrated p. 181

Excellent condition. Original canvas. The artist painted on a joined canvas, with the join running vertically through the left side of the picture and through the center of the bottle. The paint layer is untouched and beautiful condition.
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Bouteille et verre, painted in 1921, marks an important shift in the development of Juan Gris's painting.  In the years following World War I, he moved away from the complex Cubist compositions, and embraced a simpler, more elegant style, which was largely influenced by the rappel à l'ordre that characterized most of the Parisian avant-garde art during the post-war years.  The subject of still-life remained Gris's favorite motif, and in the present work he depicted some of the key elements of Cubist iconography – a bottle, a glass and a newspaper.  One of the main characteristics of this new style in Gris's art was the use of formal 'rhymes', where a single shape is used to denote different objects. In the present work, for example, the angular shape of the bottle is echoed in the parallel lines that extend towards the corner of the composition.

 

Writing about this period in Gris's painting, Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow wrote that he "abandoned the late 'synthetic' Cubist style that he had developed since 1916 in favour of a more fluid, 'poetic' style of painting, in which he preserved much of the essential pictorial discipline of Cubism and of his own methods of non-illusionistic representation which he had been developing from the start of his career.  New stylistic features here are Gris's insistence on formal resemblances and contrasts, and his extensive use of formal 'rhymes', that is to say, the repetition of the same form [...] to signify different things" (D. Cooper and G. Tinterow in The Essential Cubism (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1983, p. 178).