Juan Gris

Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris

Arthur B. Davies, New York (sold: American Art Association, New York, April 16-17, 1929, lot 364)

Mrs. Morris Hillquit, New York (acquired at the above sale and sold: Kende Galleries, New York, April 1, 1948, lot 42)

Mrs. Charles Russell, New York

Stephen Hahn, New York

Galerie Krugier, Geneva

Acquired in the 1970s

Juan Antonio Gaya-Nuno, Juan Gris, Paris, 1974, no. 306, illustrated p. 213

Douglas Cooper, Juan Gris, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Paris, 1977, no. 98, illustrated p. 159

La Tasse is an example of Juan Gris' contribution to Synthetic Cubism.  Very active in the years leading up to the First World War, Gris was admired for the consistency and depth of his artistic approach. In La Tasse, Gris fully abstracts the image of a common teacup, while still preserving sufficient detail for the viewer to reconstruct the scene visually. Venturing to challenge conventional portrayals of three-dimensional space on the canvas, the Cubists created the first major movement of 20^th century art.  In his essays on the great Cubist artists published the year before La Tasse was painted, Apollinaire wrote the following about Gris: “Here is the man who has meditated on everything modern, here is the painter who paints to conceive only new structures, whose aim is to draw or paint nothing but materially pure forms” (quoted in Juan Gris (Exhibition Catalogue), University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum, 1983, p. 153).

Gris spent the summer of 1914 in Céret, a town in the South of France where he visited with prominent artists, including his close friend Picasso. Inspired by the contemporaneous work of his colleague, Gris spent the subsequent year creating collages almost exclusively. The present composition, completed in 1914, demonstrates the spatial complexity that he achieved using cut and pasted paper, or papier collé. As his well-known and successful dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler noted, “The year 1914 … saw Gris, in company with Braque and Picasso, making great use of the technique known as papier collé. Now these artists introduced into their pictures and drawings pieces of newspaper and wall-paper, printed matter of one kind and another, engravings, oilcloth, etc., with the idea of abolishing more completely tricks of brush-work and of replacing the ‘hand-painted’ surface by the ready-made. At the same time, incorporating the actual object in the picture was intended as an act of realism” (D.H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, London, 1969, p.124).