Juan Gris's 125th Birthday
From Jonathan Jones at
The Guardian:
Google has done well in its latest Google doodle to pay homage to the least celebrated of the three great masters of cubism.
Juan Gris gets a Google doodle – and the word Google at the top of the famous search engine's welcome page has been written in hard-to-disentangle cubist kaleidoscopes of guitars, violins, eyes and music – because it's the 125th anniversary of his birth on 23 March 1887. But what is so great about Juan Gris that he should get this honour when (some might object) they have never done a Google doodle for Beryl Cook?
Cubism was, and is, the most revolutionary and profoundly beautiful modern art movement. It was discovered – for once, it makes sense to speak of an artistic idea being "discovered" like a scientific truth – by Picasso and Braque before the first world war. Their insight was complex. A painting does not have to show reality from a single point of view, as pictorial artists did from the 1400s to the late 19th century. Our eyes move about all the time, inside our restless bodies. So a cubist painting captures a series of perceptions all in one assaying of an object. Nor does the surface of a painting have to be like a window you look through: the planes of a cubist composition collide with the picture surface and even burst out from it when bits of chair cane and other objects are stuck to the canvas. And why should painting only be about looking? Cubist paintings try to somehow grasp the tactile, tangible reality of everything.
Picasso and Braque had imitators, but only one artist seriously took up their challenge to become a third great cubist painter and that was Gris. Like Picasso he was Spanish but worked in Paris, and his portrait of Picasso pays homage to a contemporary he was happy to see as a leader. Yet his interpretation of cubism is very personal. His paintings are more joyous, entertaining, and overtly ludic than those of the first cubists. He achieves this without reducing the new way of seeing to a sterile decorative style, which is why he is so important. In his 1912 painting Man in the Cafe, the 20th century explodes out of an elegant cafe-goer's smart suit: the fun of the painting is that he is totally recognisable, far more so than the people in Picasso's greatest cubist works, but also manifestly disintegrating and transforming before our eyes.
Juan Gris painted a world in revolution. A very good source for a Google doodle as reality melts with the heat of technological change.
