Word: gris
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...cubism-the static arrangement of homely objects, a glass, a bottle, a bowl, a newspaper, some cards or grapes, which could bear all the twisting and rotation and chopping that the cubist eye demanded. With a few rare exceptions, like Picasso's famous portrait of Kahnweiler or Gris's 1912 portrait of Picasso, the human figure, mutable and livery and emotionally expressive as it is, was not the ideal cubist subject. Distortion of the face or the body becomes a sort of violation in the interest of form, but one cannot violate an egg or a tabletop. They...
...Gris seems to have felt a certain helplessness in the presence of outdoor nature. Compared with his still lifes, for instance, a set of landscapes that he painted at Céret near the Spanish border of France in 1913 are almost embarrassing: he could not reduce the intractable organic shapes of hill, tree and terrace to anything much better than a set of decorous formal clichés whose color verges on the garish. Indeed, the only part of the great outdoors he could handle with ease and pleasure was the sea -itself flat, rotating upward to face...
When he did paint the figure, Gris resorted to its most masklike aspect: that of Pierrot, whose sad face and bright costume were among Picasso's favorite motifs too. But when Picasso dealt with clowns and circus performers, there was a pathos behind the image that extended back to Watteau. The Picassos also refer to the late 19th century vision of the artist as an exalted clown and are tinged with autobiography. In Gris, it is solely the interlocking shapes, checkerboard lozenge cloth and elliptical buttons that count...
...Gris responded best to objects, whether mask or tool, vessel or furniture, which were artifacts already. He dealt with them as signs rather than as Investigations of reality. Even a painting like Violin and Guitar, whose hot crimsons and acid stripes of green wall paper go far beyond the sober grays and ochres that Gris normally favored, tells us nothing of any significance about the nature of musical instruments; nor can it be said to push the analysis of form as far as Picasso or Braque were taking it at that time. But it is a marvelously controlled arrangement: frozen...
...Gris's ambition was to make what he termed une architecture plate et colorée-flat, colored architecture. "An object," he declared in a lecture in 1924, "becomes a spectacle as soon as It has a spectator. So one can think of that object in a number of ways. So a house wife might think of a table as something more or less utilitarian. A carpenter would notice how It is made and from what quality of wood. A poet-a bad one-will imagine everyone sitting round the hearth, and so forth. But for a painter...