Seated Woman 1917

Here's a ‘Seated Woman’ by Juan Gris, and it's like he built it from a kit of geometric parts. He must have been thinking hard about the architecture of the human form. Check out the shades of gray, blue, and earth tones – they're quiet, but they hum with a subdued energy. Then that ochre square in the background. What’s that about? And how about the flatness of the forms, yet there’s an attempt to show volume. It’s like Gris is wrestling with how we see, and how we know what we see. It connects to the bigger convo among painters—like Picasso and Braque—all trying to crack the code of representation. The beautiful struggle to make sense of things.