Guitar and Pipe 1913

Juan Gris made this painting called 'Guitar and Pipe' at the Dallas Museum of Art. It's a still life, but it's more like a still life that's been taken apart and put back together, or maybe not quite all the way back together. Gris uses a muted palette, lots of browns, grays, and blues, and the paint looks thin, like he's building up layers of color. It's like he's thinking about how things fit together, how forms overlap and intersect. There's this one section, a white shard with a blue flourish, that looks like it might be a piece of pottery or porcelain, a fragment of something domestic. And that fragment is nestled among darker, more geometric shapes. That little shard, to me, it's the key. It's a reminder that even in abstraction, there's a connection to the real world, to the things we touch and use every day. It reminds me a bit of Braque, how he uses found objects to bring another level of reality into his work. It's like a conversation between artists, each one building on the ideas of the others, always questioning and exploring.