Harlequin with Guitar

Juan Gris arrived in Paris in 1906, moved into the Bateau-Lavoir where Picasso was working, and spent several years drawing cartoons for magazines before painting seriously. When he did commit, he went straight into Cubism and treated it far more systematically than either Picasso or Braque. His pictures are built on visible structure, grids and diagonals that organise the whole surface before any object is described. The colour is stronger than early Cubism allowed, and the still lifes, guitars, newspapers, bottles, siphons, hold together with an almost architectural logic. He worked for Diaghilev on ballet designs in the 1920s and wrote clearly about his own methods, which is rare among the Cubists. Ill health dogged him from the middle of that decade and he died at forty. The late work turns softer, with curves replacing the earlier angles.