Still Life with Checked Tablecloth

Painted in Paris in March 1915, shortly after Juan Gris spent several months in the South of France at the outbreak of the First World War, this oil on canvas is a Cubist still life in which the artist gathers grapes, a bottle of red wine, beer, a newspaper and a guitar on a table. Gris himself wrote that his paintings were beginning to achieve a unity they had previously lacked, leaving behind the inventories of objects that had discouraged him. The composition, built from geometric forms and a checked cloth that gives the work its name, invites viewers to read the objects as one whole. The arrangement has also been seen as a bull's head, a reading that the original title, Le compotier, does not mention. In 1958, critic James Thrall Soby praised the work's warm, luminous colour and Gris's fondness for the triangle. In 2014 it sold at Christie's London for a record price for a work by the painter, and it now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Painter

Juan Gris

Date

1915

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

116 × 89 cm

Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Genre

still life

Depicts

grape, table, abstraction, still life, bottle

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