JUAN GRIS (1887-1927)

Painted in 1924, during a period in the last few years of Gris' life which the legendary art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler considered the most fruitful and beautiful of the artist's career, Assiette et pomme is a lyrical and beautifully constructed still-life. The figure of the apple recalls the simple forms of Cubism’s forebearer Cézanne whilst the bright, white tablecloth provides a dynamic counterpoint to the table beneath. Employing array of overlapping forms, contained elements, fabrics and fictive edges and frames, Assiette et pomme recalls Gris' earlier cubist aesthetic but has been softened into a more rounded and harmonious composition.
'From the purely technical point of view it was certainly the most rigorous period of his life. Stately and firm, his paintings had become the "flat coloured architecture" of which he talked. Everything was restored to the flat surface... Gris revealed himself at this time as a classical painter: lucidity, purity, the preponderance of the work of art itself, the predominance of the general, the static quality, all the symptoms are there. He is classical too in the way he subordinates his emotion to the work in which it is expressed' (D.H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, London, 1969, pp. 129-130).