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Essay on Juan Gris

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Juan Gris, a Spanish-born painter, made important contributions to the modern style of painting called Cubism. GrisÕs paintings were always depicting his immediate surroundings. He painted still lives composed of simple, everyday objects, portraits of friends, and occasionally landscapes or cityscapes. The objects in his paintings and collages are more clearly defined and richly colored than those in the works of the earlier cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
His attention to the object in his compositions, and more typically Spanish hues, link his work to the Spanish still-life tradition. That tradition presents itself in many of his works. In Gris, work Bottle of Anis del Mono he puts the whole label of the bottle. Most typical …show more content…

Cubist paintings appear between the years 1908 through the First World War.
A well-known painting that embodies this style, called Cubism is Still Life with a Guitar by Juan Gris, painted in 1913. Gris was 26 years old, when he did this oil painting. This was early in his brief career, which ended in 1927 at the age of 40. The geometrical compositions in which fragmented objects and sharp edged planes come together in an unreal clarity characterize this as part of the art form.
This work is less rigid then his other work and the objects on the table are easily identifiable. The work fills the canvas from corner to corner. Twice within the painting, you can see the guitar. There is also a shadow coming from the guitar. The shadow is not logical within the realm of reality, but typical of a cubist work. The guitar is resting on a ribboned portfolio. He also paints the wood grain, which was a later addition to cubism. In this painting there is a collage feeling element. It looks as if he pasted paper onto it but it is paint. He paints the words Le Jou on the paper that means to play. Therefore, it is as if he is playing with the pasting technique that Picasso was using in his work. They did have a friendly competitiveness between them and he paints a music sheet. Included are a pair of dice cups, a French newspaper, two clusters of grapes, and donÕt forget the cubist cup. Silhouetted flat and in black are

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