Juan Gris

Galerie Simon, Paris

Raoul La Roche, Paris

Galerie l'Effort Moderne (Léonce Rosenberg), Paris

André Lefèvre, Paris (acquired by 1946 and sold: Palais Galliéra, Paris, November 29, 1966, lot 80)

Family of André Lefèvre, Paris (acquired at the above sale and sold: Drouot-Richelieu, Paris, December 21, 2007, lot 155)

Private Collection (acquired from the above sale and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 22, 2011, lot 24)

Acquired from the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

Paris, Galerie Simon, Juan Gris, 1923, no. 10

Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Les Créateurs du Cubisme, 1935, no. 48

Stockholm, Art espagnol contemporain, 1937

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Collection André Lefèvre, 1964, no. 106

Dortmund, Museum am Ostwall & Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Juan Gris, 1965-1966, no. 64, illustrated in the catalogue

Hans Hildebrandt, Die Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Potsdam, 1924, illustrated p. 313

Waldemar George, Juan Gris, Paris, 1931, illustrated pl. 37

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: sa vie, son œuvre, ses écrits, Paris, 1946, illus. pl. XXII

Douglas Cooper, Letters of Juan Gris, 1913-1927, London, 1956, no. CI, illustrated p. 8

Douglas Cooper, Juan Gris, catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Paris, 1977, vol. II, no. 343, illustrated p. 143, illustrated in color p. 568

Please contact the Impressionist and Modern Art Department at (212) 606-7360 for the condition report for this lot.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Painted in 1920, Le Broc marks an important shift in the development of Juan Gris's painting. In the years following World War I, he moved away from 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 the still-life remained Gris's favorite motif, and in the present work he depicted some of the key elements of Cubist iconography – a pitcher, a glass, a piece of fruit and a sheet of paper, all arranged on an ambiguous surface, in front of a wooden chair. One of the main characteristics of this new style in Gris's art was the use of formal "rhymes," where a single shape denotes different objects. In the present work, for example, the curved outline of the jug becomes the edge of the glass, while the lower edge of the paper also denotes the shape of the fruit.

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 favor 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 & G. Tinterow in The Essential Cubism (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1983, p. 178).