Violin before an Open Window

Juan Gris is considered to have perfected the Cubism that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had begun to develop in Paris in 1906. Gris painted this still life in December 1926, five months before his premature death. Before an open window with a view of a mountain landscape in the background, a violin and an open book of music lie on a table between a carafe and a bowl filled with fruit. For the most part, Gris placed the color surfaces and the lines independently of one another. Only in the case of the violin and the music book do they coincide precisely, resulting in a representational depiction of spatial depth. The carafe and the bowl of fruit, on the other hand, are merely outlined in black and white. Because of this, they remain very much on the surface of the painting. Due to the transparency of the objects, the warm colors of the tabletop and the violin seem to come more to the fore. The boundary between top and bottom is blurred. Yet, this also applies to the back and the front—for example, where Gris connected the mouth of the carafe with the mountain range and where the silhouette of the latter blends into the shadows on the bowl. The painting was created using the deductive method that was typical of Gris’s synthetic Cubism, in which the pictorial object emerges exclusively from the picture’s “architecture.” Indeed, the objects appear to be of a floating lightness owing to the strong blending of forms and colors on the various picture levels.