Juan Gris
Spanish painter, 1887-1927
"José Victoriano (Carmelo Carlos) González-Pére, better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France most of his life. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive. At first Gris painted in the style of Analytical Cubism, a term he himself later coined, but after 1913 he began his conversion to Synthetic Cubism, of which he became a steadfast interpreter, with extensive use of papier collé or, collage. Gris's works from late 1916 through 1917 exhibit a greater simplification of geometric structure, a blurring of the distinction between objects and setting, as in ""Woman with Mandolin""."
Source: Wikipedia
Spanish painter (1887-1927). Autograph letter signed ("Pepe") and illustrated. Madrid. 8vo. 4 pp. on a bifolium. With ink illustrations throughout the margins.
$ 21,016 / 18.500 €
(95628/BN63268)
A whimsical illustrated letter which Gris wrote to an unidentified friend when he was only fourteen years old. Written as a response in what appears to be an ongoing correspondence about their daily lives, Gris announces that he received his friend's letter while having dessert and immediately sat down to compose an answer. He stresses that he is having an uneventful day in which nothing happens ("nada tengo que contarte, nada tengo también yo"), then pretends to have forgotten to tell the recipient about the purchase of 'an important thing, a very important thing' which turns out to be a mere water jar: "Torpe de mi tengo que contarte una cosa importante una cosa importantísima, he comprado...
a que no lo aciertas, la grandeza... Un botijo negro para refrescar el agua...". He further describes how the roads in Madrid become rubbery at noon in the summer heat, and that he had even got stuck walking on the road the previous day. In a bizarrely comical image, he quips how economical it would be to use the people stuck in the roads as poles for the tramway: "me quede incrustado y sin poder despegarme del pavimento de tan goma como estaba, [...] y apoco si no me utilizan para poste de un tranvia electrico, que con muchos como yo saldría sumamente económico". In the margins the letter contains numerous charming sketches which show a skyline, the perspective of a street, two anthropomorphic buildings, and human figures. In other illustrations we see Gris himself eating while reading a letter, writing a letter at a table, drinking, walking on the rubbery pavement, and men as put to use as electricity poles..