Violin and Guitar

Juan Gris

Violin and Guitar

Oil on Canvas, Painting

100 x 65.5 cm

1913

            Juan Gris (1887-1927) was born in Madrid where he studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas, during which time he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905 he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. In 1906 he moved to Paris where Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. Gris refined the cubist vocabulary into his own instantly recognizable visual language. He is often referred to as ‘the third cubist’ beside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Juan Gris was more calculating than any other Cubist painter in the way he composed his pictures. Every element of a painting was considered with classical precision: line, shape, tone, color and pattern were carefully refined to create an interlocking arrangement free from any unnecessary decoration or detail. The whole idea of space is rearranged – the front, back and sides of the subject become interchangeable elements. Gris’ images combine his observation with memory of the subject to create a poetic evocation of the theme.

            Violin and Guitar is a magisterial statement that marked 1913 as the beginning of Gris's mature art. Here he combines the inherent dignity and poetic quality of the objects with an exploration of their three-dimensional aspects. An essentially cruciform composition underlies the whole and lends a hierarchical air; however, as with his use of the golden section, Gris was never absolutely precise in making his measurements fit a predetermined scheme. The painting is built on a series of pictorial rhymes among the forms of the guitar, violin, and glass. Gris's predilection for rhymes, or rhythms based on visual similarities, has been compared to the techniques of the poets who were so much a part of his milieu, but it can also be found in the art of his colleagues. More fundamentally poetic is the spirited flight of artistic manipulation that occurs in the central section, juxtaposed with the conventional world symbolized by the wood molding, wallpaper, and floorboards of a surrounding room. These background details establish a representational setting as well as a pictorial plane of possibilities. This richly detailed room should be seen as having fantastic associations for Gris since he reportedly lived in utter squalor.

            This piece was chosen to look at the different styles of still life, since still life is meant to look at object in different ways. This painting offers one the ability to look at a simple object in a new way with different dimensions. It takes the style of still life to a new level- that is a different dimension. Two seemingly extravagant objects are seen in different ways and portrayed in varying places, without knowing there’s a violin and a guitar one might miss the latter entirely. But it makes the viewer pause, there’s a lot going on in the painting yet there’s just a small amount depicted. There’s much symbolism in that which causes the viewer to think about the “conventional world” in a new light.