Eminence Gris

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of the four painters who created the language of cubism in the early teens of this century--Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger--the first to die was also the youngest: Gris. His real name was Jose Gonzalez, and he was the 13th child of a polyphiloprogenitive Madrid businessman. After a brief apprenticeship as a comic illustrator in Spain, Gris got to Paris in 1906 and installed himself as Picasso's neighbor in the now legendary Bateau-Lavoir, a ramshackle cluster of studios in Montmartre. He painted nothing of importance until 1910, and uremia killed him in 1927 just after his 40th birthday.

His output small, his conduct resolutely inconspicuous, Gris has long been the least-known major French artist of the 20th century, and the claws of myth have never got a hold on the cool, highly wrought, intellectually guarded surface of his art. Nor, until now, has his adopted country honored his mem ory with an official show. The gap has at last been filled by a compendious Gris retro spective at the Orangerie in Paris (through July 1), organized by France's Chief Curator of Museums Jean Leymarie.

Still-Life Sea. The first thing to note about Gris is the acuteness of his limitations. There are some artists who can do virtually anything, Picasso being their modern archetype. There are others who seem able to master only one thing; and of these petits-maitres, Gris is the exemplar.

There was one motif--and, as this show inexorably suggests, only one--with which he was fully at home: the still life. Still life was the test bed of 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 are dead form, nature morte, already.

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 Ceret 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 cliches 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 the viewer like a blue polygonal tablecloth --framed in the shuttered terrace door of a villa on the Cote d'Azur and bearing a yacht's triangular sails the way a folded napkin might sit on a table. It is this still-life sea, a geometrical image of repose and wellbeing, that suffuses some of Gris's finest still lifes, like the View of the Bay (see color overleaf), with its firmly composed foreground of earth-colored guitar suavely undulating below the combed sky and receding gray headlands.

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 music.

Gris's ambition was to make what he termed une architecture plate et coloree--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 it will be, quite simply, a collection of flat colored shapes." Such statements have since become the cliches of every art school, and Gris was by no means the first to utter them; his ideas, in this respect, derive from earlier French art theorists like Maurice Denis. But Gris held to them with passion because (apart from any other considerations) they were not cliches 50 years ago.

Grand Displacement. "It seems to me," he reflected, "that It Is more nat ural to make subject X coincide with a painting that one gets to know rather than to make painting X coincide with a known subject." Composition, in short, gives us our sense of reality. In this way, Gris was the most formal of all the cub ists. Picasso's formality was modified by his enormous appetite, Braque's by his aristocratic fervor, Leger's by his blunt populism, but Gris was obsessed by shape and only by shape.

This obsession led to an undeniable grandeur. An early composition like Still-Life: Bottles and Knife testifies to that. Tuned down to the subtlest inter play of gray over gray, unified by the stippled crust of Gris's opaque and polished pigment, these simple objects acquire the amplitude and severity of a Romanesque nave, and one realizes that when Gris used the word "architecture," he was not using a metaphor: the slanting displacement of the still life, as though seen through rolled glass, suggests a kind of response to structural loading--slippage, compression, shear. What Gris's work lost at one end of the spectrum, that of concrete physical feeling, It picked up at the other, that of pure ideation. One contemplates that small rhythmic world, pruned of all superfluity, with the Intense pleasure that only the spectacle of the mind expounding the clarity of its own constructions seems able to evoke.

-Robert Hughes

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