Juan
Gris

Juan Gris (March 23, 1887, Madrid - May 11, 1927, Boulogne-Billancourt) - an outstanding artist and sculptor from Spain. His real name is José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González Pérez: he subsequently replaced it with a more convenient and easy to remember nickname. José was born into the family of a wealthy merchant and was the youngest of thirteen children. Interest and ability to painting showed up at a talented boy already at the age of seven years, around the same time his father’s financial affairs declined. Juan Gris had to help his family: he earned his first money selling his graphic works to local newspapers.

Gris received his primary education at the School of Industry, where he went to study at the insistence of his parents. However, interest in art won, and he abandoned his studies for painting lessons. Juan's mentor was the famous portrait painter José Moreno Carbonero, the owner of a private school in Madrid. At the age of 19, the future master of cubism, the painter Juan Gris, moved to Paris, where he lived all the time until the end of his life. This happened not only because he found here everything that is needed for an active and fruitful creative life: there was a more prosaic reason. In Spain, a liable young man did not appear for service at the appointed time, leaving the country without documents. He did not have a passport all his life, and this limited his ability to travel.

Features of the artist Juan Gris: at the very beginning of his career, like many authors of the time, he created drawings in modernist style. Later, during his studies in Paris, Gris fell under the influence of symbolism, but interest in him quickly disappeared. Not being a supporter of conservatism, to which Carbonero’s teacher was inclined, Juan began to search for what most closely corresponded to his vision of the world: this search ended when Gris became interested in cubism. Later he became the founder of a new branch of this trend - synthetic cubism.

Famous paintings by Juan Gris: "Jalousie"," Violin and glass ","Portrait of a Picasso","Man in cafe","Guitar on the chair","Bottle and knife". As an illustrator, the artist worked with the famous French avant-garde artist Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Riverdie and the Chilean writer Vicente Uidobreau.

Pictures of Juan Gris: the evolution of creativity

Meeting in Paris with the artists of Montmartre was a key moment in the creative biography of Juan. After some time, he finally breaks off all relations with publishing houses and no longer returns to the drawing. Ostropolytic and satirical caricatures no longer interest the artist.

At first, he was attracted to the manner Cezanne: he was Gris's favorite painter. However, as he honed his own mastery, he gradually cooled to post-impressionism and expressionism. The greatest influence on the formation of Juan as a master of abstract painting has had creativity Picasso, Legeras well as the founder of cubism . For the first significant paintings of Juan Gris, written in Paris, the features of this direction are characteristic.

The style in which the artist preferred to work is called analytical cubism. It is characterized by vague, almost absent boundaries between the shape of objects and the space surrounding them, the randomness of the location of objects, iridescent colors and a multitude of intersecting faces. For example, the famous painting by Guan and Flowers by Juan Gris, as well as several other works with a date of creation before 1912, were written in this spirit.

Further, the artist's work evolves: he analyzes the work of Braque and develops his own style of drawing based on his ideas. In his paintings of this period one feels more material than in the works of his colleagues: they have volume and plasticity, have similarities with sculpture and architecture, which Green was fond of. Cloths are less decorative than those of Picasso or Marriage, as well as greater similarity with the objects depicted. The well-known "synthetic" works of Juan include "The Glass and the Newspaper", "The Chessboard", and "The Fruit Bowl". In the 1920s, the artist’s style became less severe: lines softened, large forms and large surfaces began to dominate on the canvases.