Newspaper and Fruit Dish 1916

Juan Gris made this painting of a newspaper and fruit dish using oil paint, though when exactly I couldn't tell you. I love the way he's working with the process, how the angular shapes are built up almost like a collage, but entirely through paint. It’s like he’s thinking through the act of making. The texture in this piece gets me – not just the flat planes, but how he suggests depth and form through the varied surfaces. Look at that newspaper, "Le Journal," sitting there. It's not just a flat white rectangle, but the way he's added the text and those triangular shadows, it feels almost tactile, like you could pick it right up. Then there are those fields of stippling, the way Gris makes these repeated marks gives me the same feeling as weaving, as if he is re-creating the world through touch, one dab at a time. Gris really understood that art is a conversation across time. You can see echoes of Cézanne in his work, but he takes it somewhere new, pushing further into abstraction. It’s like he’s saying, "Let’s not just look at the world, let’s build it, one brushstroke at a time."