Juan Gris

José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez, known under the name of Juan Gris, born March 23, 1887 in Madrid and died May 11, 1927 in Boulogne-Billancourt, is a Spanish painter close to Cubism, who lived and worked in France from from 1906. Biography Juan Gris studied industrial design at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid, between 1902 and 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local newspapers. In 1904 and 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. In 1906, he moved to Paris where he became a friend of Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. There he meets and befriends his compatriot Pablo Picasso. His 1912 portrait of Picasso is one of the first cubist paintings made by a painter other than Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque. In 1915, he was painted by his friend Amedeo Modigliani. Although he submitted humorous illustrations to newspapers such as L'Assiette aueurre1, Le Charivari, Le Témoin, and Le Cri de Paris, Juan Gris did not begin to paint seriously until 1910. By 1912, he developed a style personal cubist. His greatest period is between 1914 and 1918. At first he was influenced by analytical cubism, but after 1915 he began his conversion to synthetic cubism of which he became a persistent interpreter. In 1922, the painter painted the first sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev. Juan Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories between 1924 and 1925. He delivered his final reading, Des possibilities de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf in 1925. Juan Gris died of uremia in Boulogne-Billancourt on May 11, 1927 at the age of 40, leaving his wife Josette and his son Georges. Although he viewed Picasso as his teacher, Gertrude Stein acknowledges that Juan Gris "was the only person Picasso would have willingly removed from the map." Salvador Dalí says of him: “Juan Gris is the greatest of Cubist painters, more important than Picasso because he is truer. Picasso was constantly tormented by the desire to understand Gris's manner in which paintings were technically always accomplished, of perfect homogeneity, while he never managed to fill his surfaces satisfactorily, covering the canvas with difficulty with a sour matter. He kept asking: “What are you putting there? - Turpentine. " He tried the mix, failed, immediately gave up, moving on, divine impatience. "