Juan Gris (1887-1927)

Painted in 1925, just two years before Gris’ untimely death in 1927, Broc et carafe is a lyrical still-life that displays the artist’s mastery of the still-life genre that had preoccupied him since his first cubist explorations in 1912. With rich, warm hues, Gris returned to the domestic objects, which had first inspired the early compositions of Cubism, including a copy of French newspaper Le Journal. A deep red, fictive border frames the still-life scene, providing a pictorial stage on which to view Gris’ masterful formal inventiveness.

From the last phase of the artist’s career, Broc et carafe exudes a sense of compositional balance and harmony. The objects are arranged frontally across the canvas, and are depicted with a sense of totality and wholeness. Gris’ dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler posited that it was during these final years of the artist’s life that his work attained a perfect equilibrium between a carefully composed compositional structure and a sensuous harmony of colour and form; a summation of his artistic explorations. He wrote, ‘It was at this time that he laid the foundations of the method that culminated in the masterpieces of his last years, which sum up the whole of his earlier work.’ (D. H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, London, 1969, p. 144).

In 1925, at the time when Broc et carafe was painted, Gris had finally achieved a certain prosperity and professional success. The renowned Parisian art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, had approached Gris, imploring the artist to accept his offer to represent him. Gris, faithful to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer with whom the artist had a contract and at whose gallery he had just enjoyed a successful exhibition, declined Rosenberg’s offer. In early 1927, just a few months before Gris’ frail health drastically deteriorated, the artist rejoiced that, ‘Today, at nearly forty years old, I believe that I am approaching a new period of expression, of pictorial expression, of picture-language; a well-thought out and well-finished unity.’ (Gris, quoted in Maurice Raynal, Anthology of Painting in France, from 1966 to the Present Day, Paris, 1927, in Kahnweiler, ibid., p. 204). Broc et carafe perfectly encapsulates a sense of unity, balance and serenity, and the ‘pictorial expression’ that Gris’ believed his final works embodied.