Harlequin with a Guitar
Juan Gris, 1917
In this painting, Juan Gris depicts a harlequin in his checkered costume, a figure Cubist artists returned to again and again. The harlequin's clothing, split into geometric patches, suited the way Gris broke objects down into flat planes. Here the character appears beside a guitar, another instrument common in Cubist works, where volumes are reduced to intersecting surfaces and lines. Gris revisited this subject many times between 1917 and 1925, producing roughly forty works, which suggests the harlequin was for him a sustained line of inquiry rather than a single episode. The picture is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it stands among the pieces that help trace that development.
- Painter
- Juan Gris
- Date
- 1917
- Medium
- oil paint, panel
- Dimensions
- 101 × 65 cm
- Museum
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
- Depicts
- abstraction
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