The Bottle of Anís del Mono
Juan Gris (1887 to 1927) · 1914
A tall bottle of Anís del Mono, the sweet aniseed liqueur that every Spaniard recognises, stands on a cafe table with a glass and a folded newspaper. But the bottle has been taken apart. Its faceted glass body, its label with the famous monkey, its cork and its shadow are each shown from a different angle and pasted back together, so that you seem to see it while walking round it. Part of the label is the real thing, cut out and glued on; part of the newspaper is real newsprint. It is a small picture, less than half a metre high, and one of the most precise Cubist works ever made.
Juan Gris was born in Madrid as José Victoriano González and moved to Paris in 1906, where he lived in the same building as Picasso. He came to Cubism late and made it his own, cooler and more architectural than Picasso or Braque. Look at the underlying grid of verticals and diagonals that organises the picture, and at the way the pasted papers are treated as colour and texture rather than as tricks. The diamond pattern of the bottle repeats across the whole surface. Gris said that he began with the abstract composition and then found the objects in it, whereas Cézanne had turned a bottle into a cylinder; he turned a cylinder into a bottle.
The painting was made in Paris in the summer of 1914, weeks before the First World War scattered the Cubist circle. It entered the Reina Sofía collection in the late 1980s as the museum built up its holdings of Gris, who is the third Spaniard, after Picasso and Miró, at the heart of Collection 1. The bottle of Anís del Mono, still sold today in the same faceted glass, is the most Spanish object in the whole story of Cubism.
Did You Know? The Anís del Mono bottle with its monkey label, designed in 1870, was itself an early piece of modern branding, which is partly why Gris chose it.
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