- What was the primary intent of Gris’ work?
“Juan Gris believed that a painting was not merely a representation of an object from reality. He thought that the artist should recreate and reinterpret that object in his painting.”
Source: https://www.spanish-art.org/spanish-painting-gris.html
- What was Cornell’s attraction to Gris’ works?
“On one of his frequent trips to the gallery district in midtown Manhattan, Cornell visited the Sidney Janis Gallery on East 57th Street. Among a presentation of approximately 30 works by modern artists, one alone captivated Cornell—Juan Gris’s celebrated collage The Man at the Café (1914)”
Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2018/birds-of-a-feather
- How did the time period influence the cubism movement?
“When the geopolitical dominoes fell after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, Picasso’s name was synonymous with modern art, specifically Cubism…Picasso’s push accelerated as the Parisian homefront around him began associating Cubism and other modern movements with the enemy. “Disparagingly referred to as ‘bôche,’ Cubism was identified with the German enemy and perceived as unpatriotic,” curator Simonetta Fraquelli writes in the catalogue. (A short film in the gallery wonderfully captures the wartime hysteria that swept Cubism up in its wake.) Even if he never saw the battlefield, Picasso still needed to battle misperceptions of his art.” This speaks about Picasso specifically, but speaks to the Cubist art movement as a whole during the time as well.
Source: https://bigthink.com/Picture-This/how-world-war-i-changed-pablo-picasso
- Why was mixing oil paint and collage such a popular choice in this style of art?
“Cubists had been trying to portray reality the way the human mind perceived it, from multiple points of view and through the passing of time. By introducing non-painted, real-world materials to the surface of a painting, Picasso introduced an entirely new level of realism to the equation.”
Source: https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/cubist-collage
- How did the juxtaposition of 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional elements in Gris’ work impact the work?
“These characteristics are consistent with Picasso’s and Braque’s work of the same period; the Cubist fragmentations and multiple perspectives imply, if not describe, our perceptions while moving through 3D space. Yet Gris’ rotational transformations also involve, in a specific manner, our perceptual motion through the 2D composition of the painting. Gris defines and combines two distinct motion contexts: motion in the world at large (the Cubists’ investigation) and motion on the surface of the painting (rotational transformation). The effect of Gris’ compositional method is to offer a larger, coherent structure to what appears to be a rather random break-up of the images. Rotational transformation provides the viewer opportunity for a perceptual re-integration that counteracts the tendency towards fragmentation.”
Source: https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2012/bridges2012-283.pdf
