Biography of Juan Gris

blouinartinfo
2 min readSep 6, 2017

Juan Gris was one of the very few painters who built a foundation of early Cubism and steered the movement in new directions. Gris’s paintings are immediately distinguishable as they are informed by his background as an illustrator.

Childhood
The leading figure in Cubist painting was on born José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez in Madrid in 1887. He attended Madrid’s Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas from 1902 to 1904, where he studied physics, mathematics, and mechanical drawing. The rigidity of academic life did not appeal to him, though he was a strong student, and his natural ability in drawing encouraged him to shift his focus to the study of art.

Early Training
He studied painting after leaving school, tutoring under José Moreno Carbonero, a respected and sucessful artist in Madrid who had himself taught Picasso and Salvador Dali. While working under Carbonero in 1905, it was during this time that González-Pérez changed his name to Juan Gris.

He moved to Paris in 1906, and sold all his possessions shortly after the death of his father, and therefore remain in the city for much of his life. However, he had no passport since he had dodged Spain’s obligatory military service and could neither leave France nor return to Spain.

He worked as an illustrator and satirical cartoonist during his early years in Paris for a variety of magazines and periodicals. He met Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and the American writer Gertrude Stein in the Montmartre artist commune Bateau Lavoir, where he settle and they became a lifelong admirer and collector of his work.

He began to devote more energy to his own painting as he developed relationships with fellow artists. he initially worked in the style he would later define as Analytic Cubism, as he developed relationships with fellow artists known for its monochromatic color, use of linear grids, and breaking down of a subject into geometric planes.

Legacy

During his relatively short life, he established himself as one of the most distinctive figures in Cubism. It is one image, where his paintings combine different viewpoints of a subject in calling attention to the limitations of traditional perspective and striving toward a new way of seeing that reflects the complexity of the modern age.

Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture although it is primarily associated with painting. Cubism also had consequences that were far-reaching for Surrealism, Dada, and the rise of midcentury Abstract Expressionism liberating formal concepts initiated by it.

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