(1887-1927)

Although Juan Gris was among the prewar Cubists, his style was more hieratic and always directed toward the clear if stylized symbolization of conventional motifs such as still life and figure. It was readily adaptable for the many who worked in a rather subdued Cubist idiom between the wars.

GRIS' THOUGHTS ON ART

" I work with the elements of the intellect, with the imagination. I try to make concrete that which is abstract. I proceed from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I start with an abstraction in order to arriveat a true fact. Mine is an art of synthesis, of deduction. . . .
I want to endow the elements I use with a new quality; starting fromgeneral types I want to construct particular individuals. I consider that the architectural element in painting is mathematics, the abstract side; I want to humanize it. Cdzanne turns a bottle into a cylinder,but I begin with a cylinder and create an individual of a special type: I make a bottle a particular bottle out of a cylinder. Cdzanne tends toward architecture, I tend away from it. That is why I compose with abstractions(colors) and make my adjustments when these colors have assumed the form of objects. For example, I make a composition with a white and a black andmake adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow: what I mean is that I adjust the white so that it becomes a paperand the black so that it becomes a shadow. This painting is to the other what poetry is to prose. Though in my system I may depart greatly from any form of idealistic or naturalistic art, in practice I cannot break away from the Louvre. Mine is the method of all times, the method used by the old masters: there aretechnical means and they remain constant. [1921]

INTRODUCTION     WHAT ART IS   SPIRIT OF ART    REFLECTIONS BY ARTISTS    MY WORKS OF ART