Juan Gris, one of the greatest artists of the Cubist movement, was born Jose Victoriano Gonzalez-Perez on 13 March 1887 in Madrid, Spain. In his youth, Gris studied engineering at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas (School of Arts and Manufactures) in Madrid and soon gravitated to mechanical drawing, which led him to realize his passion for the arts. In 1904 he left the school to study painting with the academic artist Jose Maria Carbonero. Increasingly impassioned by his explorations and frustrated by the relatively provincial atmosphere of Madrid, he moved to Paris in 1906; it was at this time that he took up his pseudonym, “Juan Gris.”

In Paris, Gris was quickly embraced by the modern arts scene and became friends with such artistic luminaries as Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as with eminent poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Andre Salmon. Perhaps most notable was the relationship that Gris developed with the man who he would later call his teacher, Pablo Picasso. While some journals published some of Gris’s darkly humorous illustrations beginning soon after his arrival, it wasn’t until 1910 that he began his career as a serious artist. The following year he spent a great deal of time with Picasso and picked up many of the intricate nuances of Cubism, as evidence by his famed painting, Portrait of Picasso (1912).

By 1912 Gris had developed his own, personal Cubist style. He began to use a great deal of papier colle (a type of collage) in his work and unlike Picasso and Braque’s somewhat monochromatic work, Gris preferred to paint with bright, vibrant colors in intriguing, novel combinations. His artwork always portrayed his immediate surroundings; he usually created portraits of his friends, still lifes with simple, familiar objects, and the occasionally cityscape and landscape. With work made unique by the combination of elements he had learned from Braque and Picasso and those of his own invention, Gris acknowledged his art was distinct from those who had preceded him in Cubism: ‘Cezanne [who is widely regarded as the father of Cubism] made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle out of a cylinder.’

By the early 1920s, Gris was attracting attention from all manner of influential artists and performers. In 1922 he was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, the world-renowned art critic, dancer, and founder of the esteemed Ballet Russes, to design sets and costumes for their performances. In 1924 he was invited to speak at the Sorbonne where he gave his definitive lecture, “Des possibilites de la peinture” (“The possibilities of painting”), which was widely reprinted and translated into English, German, and Spanish. Gris also had major exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, and Dusseldorf in just a few years

Too soon, Gris was overcome by bronchitis, then asthma, and eventually uremia. He died at the young age of 40 on 11 May 1927.