Newspaper, Glass and Pear 1917

Juan Gris’s painting "Newspaper, Glass and Pear" is a tight composition of grey, white, and rust colored geometrical shapes that suggest a collection of domestic objects. The paint is thinly applied, scrubbed into the canvas. I imagine Gris squinting at a still life of a table, newspaper, glass, and pear and then reconstructing what he sees in flattened and faceted shapes on the canvas. How did he decide which shapes to highlight and how did he decide where to put them? The relationships between the shapes become the point, not the objects. Gris was part of a generation of painters who were in conversation with one another, building on each other’s ideas to develop new ways of seeing and representing the world, pushing the boundaries of what painting could be. These painters embraced ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations of the world.