Clear & Cold

Juan Gris was an artist who earned respect, if not popularity. His severely cubist paintings, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, were mostly classics of their kind. Gris's favorite props--wine bottles, clay pipes, books, newspapers and guitars--were crowded into compositions as slick and tight as nylon stockings. They were neither completely representational nor completely abstract, for Gris believed the two elements were like the warp and woof in weaving, inseparable.

Like his friends and fellow cubists, Braque and Picasso, Gris began,his pictures as abstractions. "Cezanne," he once wrote, "turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I begin with a cylinder and . . . make a bottle." He represented objects, he added, only "in order to prevent the combination of colored forms suggesting to [the spectator] a reality which I have not intended." Writing "On the Possibilities of Painting," he strictly defined the narrow possibilities of his own approach:

"A housewife," he said, "will consider a table from a utilitarian angle. A carpenter will note the way it is made and the quality of the wood used. A poet--a bad poet --will find in it a symbol of the peace of the home. And so on ... For a painter, it will quite simply be a grouping of flat, colored forms. And I mean flat . . ."

Gris's colors were on the flat side--a patchwork of plush green, stained walnut, grey felt and golden oak--but his forms were as many-faceted as a fly's eye. Until his death (at 40) in 1927, he was a master practitioner of cubism as well as its best spokesman.

Unlike most of his Montmartre crowd, Gris had been blessed with humility from the start. In a letter written in 1915 and published in Art News last week, he told more about his art than any theoretical discussion could: "I am making progress in my painting. It seems to me that it is settling down well and that everything is becoming concrete and concise. All this, naturally, is only as far as ideas and the organization of ideas are concerned. As to the pictorial side, I know nothing about it ... Nowhere in my works do I find room for that sensibility and sensuality that I believe must always be present. Is it, perhaps, because I am wrong in wanting to rediscover the pictorial qualities of an ancient art in a new one? All the same, I find my pictures excessively cold."

Critics would be hard put to match the justice of that, or of Gris's conclusion: "No matter, after all, one must paint as one is. My spirit is too exact to dirty a blue or twist a straight line."

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