The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 29, no. 8 (April, 1971)

Harlequin with Guitar, 1917, by Gris. Oil on woodpanel, 391/4 x 251/2 inches. The Alex Hillman FamilyFoundation, New Yorkcally thought out rather than empirical and imaginative. But theyare truly cubist in spirit: Gris, like Braque and Picasso, was concernedwith giving as accurate and complete a representationas possible of tangible reality as we know it intellectually to be.Gris's approach to painting differed from that of Braque andPicasso in that his was a more scientific type of mind, dependingon analysis and reasoning rather than instinct. And this approachhad been encouraged by his early training in the methods ofscience and engineering. Moreover, after 1914 it found expressionthrough his method of first drawing in a formal composition,based on a predetermined division of the canvas into a harmoniousarrangement of colored forms that he himself referredto as "flat, colored architecture." This procedure first becameevident when Gris began to work with pasted papers, becausehe would cut these to the required shapes and then paste themtogether as an overall design before giving them objective meaningby overdrawing, by adding representational details, and byintroducing chiaroscuro to create volume and separate one planefrom another.Now it was in this second stage that Gris, who did not hesitateto seek help from mathematical calculations at the start, provedhe was not the victim of any theory or geometrical formula. Forwhenever Gris felt that he must modify, even transform, thecolored elements of his basic composition to keep from distortingthe reality of the objects and the spatial relationships betweenthem, he did so. Thus Gris's pictures convey visually convincingimages of reality because he knew how to temper sciencewith intuition. Gris's cubist works are more constructed, moreabsolute, more solemn and intense, artistically less free and fancifulthan those of Braque and Picasso, but because of the interventionof his sensibility they are not coldly intellectual or schematic.And this becomes increasingly evident after 1915, when Gris,like Braque and Picasso, set about extending the expressive possibilitiesof his style and began to cultivate the sort of sensitiveand sensuous element in his pictures that he had discovered inworks of the French school by artists like Fouquet, Louis Le Nain,and Boucher, as well as the school of Fontainebleau.Having said this, it is impossible not to go on to discuss themore active role that this compensatory side of his nature-thelyrical as opposed to the intellectual, the sensuous as opposed tothe severe -began to play in Juan Gris's conception of paintingfrom 1920 onward. Right from the start Gris had accommodatedhis feeling for sensuous values not only in the richness of hiscolor but also in his subtle differentiations of texture. However,at this early stage, when he was primarily concerned with problemsof composition, of pictorial form, and with establishing hispictorial grasp on reality, Gris gave precedence to his sense of"flat, colored architecture" and subjected his lyrical instincts to