The Guitar
Juan Gris (1887 to 1927) · 1918
A guitar lies across a table in a dark interior, its curved body and sound hole cut into flat shapes of brown, black, grey and blue, with a sheet of music and the edge of a window behind. Nothing is seen from one point of view. The guitar's neck tilts one way and its body another, the table top is folded up toward you, and yet the whole thing reads instantly as a guitar on a table in a room. The palette is restrained and the surfaces are smooth, with none of the collage and scraps of newspaper of Gris's earlier work. It is Cubism grown calm.
Gris painted it in 1918, in the last year of the First World War, when he was living quietly in Beaulieu near Paris and working through a series of still lifes with musical instruments. Look at the way he uses light: strong diagonal shafts cut across the composition as if from a window, and each object changes colour where the light strikes it, so that the picture is structured by light as much as by outline. He was studying the old masters at this time, above all Zurbarán and Chardin, and the sober harmony here owes something to them. The guitar was the emblem of Cubism from its first years, the Spanish instrument that Picasso, Braque and Gris all returned to.
The Reina Sofía has one of the largest groups of paintings by Gris anywhere, assembled after the museum was founded in the 1980s to make sure that the artist most neglected in his own country was properly represented. He died in 1927 at only forty, and his work was largely absent from Spain until these acquisitions. Standing among them you can follow how his art tightened and cleared from year to year.
Did You Know? Gris took his name from the French word for grey, and his Cubist paintings of these years are full of subtle greys and silvers.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.