World of Fantasy and Analysis

By ROBERT HUGHES

A pioneer in cubism, Juan Gris had a split vision of reality

I find my pictures excessively cold," the cubist painter Juan Gris complained to his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in 1915. "Oh, how I wish I had the freedom and the charm of the unfinished! Well, it can't be helped. One must after all paint as one is oneself. My mind is too precise to go dirtying a blue or twisting a straight line."

Compared with that of Picasso or Braque, the inventors of cubism, Gris' work does seem programmed and synthesized: in its fondness for the grid and the deliberate repetition, it is a long way from the flickering mutability, the twisting disintegration of objects in newly imagined space, that gave early cubism its wildly adventurous look. Gris was a Madrileno--which was to say, a provincial, brought up in a far stodgier cultural milieu than Picasso the Catalan--and his work does not even look particularly "Spanish": no craziness, no tragedy, no genitals, no folklore.

Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic decor in the '20s, and by 1927, at 40, he was dead of uremia, the only major cubist not to live to a ripe old age.

The exhibition of 99 paintings, drawings and collages by Juan Gris at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, B.C., is of exceptional interest. Organized by Mark Rosenthal, an art historian from Berkeley, Calif, it will give most museumgoers in America their first proper look at one of the fundamental modernist painters. There have not been many unalloyed classicists in 20th century art, and although Gris' work has its avant-garde credentials, it can now be seen as he probably wanted it to be: as the extension, into a modern idiom (for cubism was, to him, a kind of ultimate language) of the tradition of calm, cerebrative painting that flowed from Chardin through Seurat, and whose essential subject was still life.

Dickering with his bottles, violins, fruit dishes, newspapers, pipes, siphons and fruit, Gris--so the conventional account runs--wanted to construct an ideal world, a nirvana of the inanimate, whose planes and contours fitted together in their complex reversals and transparencies like a perfectly thought-out puzzle: metaspace, as it were, a place beyond touch, in which only the eye can travel. There are few and sometimes no objective counterparts to the splits and mirrorings Gris imposed on his small theater of objects, but to examine the great, intricate still lifes of 1915-16 is to see fantasy and analysis held in equilibrium.

Yet one can flatten Gris by imposing too heavy a classical stereotype on him. Quite often his art was as much about In jokes and irreverent manipulation as it was about balance, as Rosenthal points out. For cubism was created by a high-spirited clique of young outsiders, reacting to the pervasive, ephemeral surface of Parisian culture with puns and gossip, the arcane jokey language of their own group. As a former cartoonist, Gris delighted in this "Pop" view of his tunes, and it suffuses some of his best paintings. The Man at the Cafe, 1914, looks at first like a conventional cubist figure, the clues to its presence being the hat, the blue hand holding a newspaper, and the stein of beer with its " white froth. But if one reads the glued-on newspaper he is reading, the main story turns out to be about art forgery and how fingerprinting might be used as proof of authenticity.

In Gris' mind, this duality was part of the ever active debate over what was true and what false in cubist representation, where fragments of the real world (including the news) combined with unreal space. To complicate things further, the man at the cafe--melting away, like the elusive Pimpernel, into the wood work--probably depicts Gris' favorite character pulp fiction. He was a supercrook named Fantomas, whose nefarious deeds were eagerly devoured by Picasso, Apollinaire and everyone in the cubist circle. Appearing and disappearing at will, frustrating the law at every turn, Fantomas was to cubism what Superman, 50 years later, would be to Pop. He epitomized the grand game of detection, ambiguity challenging reality, that the cubists, Gris included, wanted to install at the center of painting. This game was what Juan Gris' use of collage was really about, and as a result his work in the high cubist years is seeded with puns, cross references and deadpan jokes that will keep art historians busy for some time yet.

But in the end, it is Gris the classicist who prevails. Not in his decorative form: Gris' compositional habits turn the corner from cubism into art deco and prepare the decorative style of the '20s, but that is secondary. Rather, what one admires is the stringent purity of his vision and the economy with which he deployed it. Conservative radical, or radical conservative? Both, at different times. If he had recovered from his slump in the '20s and lived an other 30 years, he might have turned out to be the equal of Mondrian.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.