Juan Gris was born Juan José Victoriano González Perisies in 1887, and he began his artistic career in the French domain by drawing caricatures for number of newspapers, such as the Charivari, L’Assiette au beurre, Le Cris de Paris, etc. Thanks to the support and immense influence of Picasso, Gris naturally gravitated towards the Bateau-Lavoir. With Picasso and Braque, he participated in the bohemian life enjoyed by artists that lived on Montmartre for around fifteen years, in company with Kees van Dongen, Max Jacob and Pierre Mac Orlan, among others.
In addition to signing a contract with Kahnweiler, Gris saw prosperity when Gertrude Stein, following the example of Léonce Rosenberg, bought a large number of its works. He also knew to surround himself with painters such as Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse, with whom he enjoyed many moments in Collioure, but also entertained poets like Reverdy, Apollinaire and Max Jacob, who he saw often.
Sick since adolescence, the artist was always interested, in spite of his magnificent Portrait of Pablo Picasso and his Portrait of Maurice Raynal, in objects more than men. A homebody, he jostled and reinvented all our daily objects, picking them apart one by one all the better to reassemble them, he the great organiser, as we see in Still-Life (Violin and Inkwell) (opposite), Fantômas or Breakfast. Suggesting more than it reveals, his work is a subtle ode to metonymy.
Understanding the whole poetry of his work, Diaghilev commissioned from him a series of sets and costumes for his Ballets Russes in 1922. In 1924, at the age of thirty-seven, he delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne on “The Possibilities of Painting” and passed away three years later, too young, of a uraemia.