Juan Gris was born Jose Victoriano Gonzalez in Madrid during the year 1887.
He was known as a quitest whose life was marked by very few incidents. He
studied first to be an engineer at the School of Arts and Manufactures in
Madrid, which he entered in 1902. By the time he abandoned this for an artistic
career he was already contributing illustrations to the reviews Blanco y Negro
and Madrid Comico.
In 1910 he began his career as a serious artist by making a series of large
watercolours. In the following year he started to paint. Gris's subject-matter
was always his immediate surroundings: he produced still lifes composed of
simple, everyday objects, portraits of friends, and occasionally landscapes
or cityscapes.
In 1911 (the year in which he spent time with Picasso)
he held his first exhibition, showing fifteen paintings at the little gallery
run by Clovis Sagot. This was well received by those whose opinion he respected,
and he was sufficiently encouraged to send three paintings to the Salon des
Independants in the spring of 1912. In October of the same year he showed
his work in the Section d'Or exhibition, with Marcoussis, Gleizes and Metzinger.
Since Braque and Picasso were not at this time
showing their work, the Section d'Or was the public face of Cubism. Gris was
clearly the most gifted of the group, and he attracted the attention both
of dealers and of well informed collectors. His work was evolving rapidly;
he had grasped the significance of collage almost as soon as it was invented
by Braque and Picasso
in 1912.
In 1920, just after he had signed a new contract, Gris suffered a serious
attack of pleurisy, and his health was never to be strong again. In 1925 Gris
had his first exhibition - and the only one in his lifetime - outside France,
at the Flechtheim Gallery in Duesseldorf. His health was now very poor: bronchitis
was succeeded by asthma and finally by uremia. Gris died on 11 May 1927 at
the age of forty, leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges.
