Juan Gris´125th birthday

Today,Google's doodle features stylized representations of musical instruments - familiar components of Gris's surrealistic vocabulary.

JUAN GRIS

Gris was born José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez in Madrid on 23 March 1887. After studying art in Spain he moved to Paris in 1906 where he became a friend and contemporary of artists including Henri Matisse and Amodeo Modigliani.

By 1910 he had developed his own cubist style. His work typically featured jagged and angular arrangements of objects or people painted using a palette of muted tones.

An important figure in Spanish painting before and after the First World War, the artist Juan Gris is considered the Third Member of Cubism,  after Pablo Picasso and George Braque, although he remains greatly overshadowed by his more famous colleagues. Gris worked his way through analytical and synthetic Cubism, to create his own unique and colourful style, but it was his highly intellectual approach to his work that established him as the greatest theorist among the Cubist painters. This alone secures his place as a leading figure in the history of artin the early 20th century. Also significantly influenced by Fauvism art, his best known work is Portrait of Picasso (1912, Art Institute of Chicago). Gris is regarded as one of the great abstract painters of the early 20th century. Noted in particular for his Cubist-style still life painting, his best known works include: Portrait of Picasso (1912, Art Institute of Chicago), Violin And Checkerboard (1913, Private Collection), The Sunblind (1914, Tate Collection, London), Portrait of Josette (1916, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid), Violin (1916, Kunstmuseum, Basel), Harlequin with Guitar (1919, Private Collection), The View Across the Bay (1921, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris). A number of his paintings and prints are available online in the form of poster art. Married with a son, Gris died in 1927 at the age of 40 after suffering from chronic kidney failure

Gris, whose painting Violon et guitare sold for $28.6m at auction in New York in 2010, was also acquainted with fellow Spaniard Picasso, who he regarded as a teacher. His 1912 Portrait of Picasso is claimed to be the first cubist work not painted by Picasso or the French painter Georges Braque, The Guardian says.

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