Juan Gris (1887-1927)

Gris arrived in Paris in 1906, and took up residence at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he met Pablo Picasso, and through him Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Maurice Raynal, Pierre Reverdy and other artists, poets and critics at the forefront of a new generation of Paris’ avant-garde. In the present work, which was published in L’Indiscret in 1908, the character in the background on the right is an artist, standing hunched over with a portfolio under his arms and making direct eye contact with the viewer. Such was the life of Gris in his first six years in Paris, as he would descend La Butte in Montmartre to deliver his drawings to the headquarters of the various magazines for which he worked as an illustrator—L’Indiscret, Le Témoin, and L’Assiette au Beurre.