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Lot Essay
Nature morte à la théière is a still life by the artist considered the third 'true' Cubist, Juan Gris, dating from one of the apogees of his career. This picture was formerly in the collection of the legendary art historian Douglas Cooper, who was responsible for the catalogue raisonné of Gris' work and who also translated the dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler's monograph on him. He bought this work from the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1938, during the incredible spending spree which lasted almost a decade, throughout the 1930s, and which saw him using his inheritance to assemble one of the most impressive groupings of works by the Cubists ever, mainly focussing on Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and Gris. Nature morte à la théière has even featured in exhibitions dedicated to Cooper's collecting habits.
When Nature morte à la théière was executed in 1916, Gris had been going through a minor revolution in his art. During the previous years, once he had arrived at a Cubist idiom through his own tireless researches, he had created pictures that had a marked complexity. Now, he began to remove some of the clutter from his compositions, seeking a new clarity. As he Kahnweiler the previous year, 'I think I have really made progress recently and that my pictures begin to have a unity which they have lacked till now. They are no longer those inventories of objects which used to depress me so much' (Gris, quoted in C. Green, Juan Gris, London and New Haven, 1992, p. 51). That unity is clearly present in Nature morte à la théière, which shows just a couple of objects in a manner that combines the pared-back observations of his pre-Cubist works with the diagonal planes of shading that are an extension of the techniques he used in his oil paintings. Here, these fields of shade have been rendered with an incredible variety of density, revealing the meticulous draughtsmanship at work while also adding to the general dynamism of the composition. At the same time, it adds to the sense of luminosity in the picture, allowing the areas of the sheet which have been left in reserve to glow through their contrast with the shaded parts. Looking at Nature morte à la théière, it becomes clear why Kahnweiler wrote, of the works of around 1916, that:
'Gris finally gave up presenting the beholder with a great variety of information (acquired by empirical observation) about the objects which he displayed. He now offered a synthesis: that is to say, he packed his knowledge into one significant form, a single emblem. True conceptual painting was born' (D.-H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, trans. D. Cooper, London, 1969, p. 126).
When Nature morte à la théière was executed in 1916, Gris had been going through a minor revolution in his art. During the previous years, once he had arrived at a Cubist idiom through his own tireless researches, he had created pictures that had a marked complexity. Now, he began to remove some of the clutter from his compositions, seeking a new clarity. As he Kahnweiler the previous year, 'I think I have really made progress recently and that my pictures begin to have a unity which they have lacked till now. They are no longer those inventories of objects which used to depress me so much' (Gris, quoted in C. Green, Juan Gris, London and New Haven, 1992, p. 51). That unity is clearly present in Nature morte à la théière, which shows just a couple of objects in a manner that combines the pared-back observations of his pre-Cubist works with the diagonal planes of shading that are an extension of the techniques he used in his oil paintings. Here, these fields of shade have been rendered with an incredible variety of density, revealing the meticulous draughtsmanship at work while also adding to the general dynamism of the composition. At the same time, it adds to the sense of luminosity in the picture, allowing the areas of the sheet which have been left in reserve to glow through their contrast with the shaded parts. Looking at Nature morte à la théière, it becomes clear why Kahnweiler wrote, of the works of around 1916, that:
'Gris finally gave up presenting the beholder with a great variety of information (acquired by empirical observation) about the objects which he displayed. He now offered a synthesis: that is to say, he packed his knowledge into one significant form, a single emblem. True conceptual painting was born' (D.-H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, trans. D. Cooper, London, 1969, p. 126).