This artwork is titled, “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth,”
and was painted by the artist Juan Gris in the spring of 1915.
This painting is considered one of his masterpieces.
The style is Cubism.
In the painting, we see a table with a checked tablecloth and still life objects.
Some of these are clearly identifiable, such as
the newspaper, the grapes, wine and beer bottles, and cigarettes.
Other items are harder to find, such as
the teacup, the guitar, and the wine glass.
This collage-like painting was influenced by his experimentation with actual collages in 1914,
in which he used newspaper and decorative paper cuttings, as well as labels.
Collage was tremendously popular among Cubist artists.
Although this is an oil painting, the composition resonates with his papiers collés.
This piece is very colorful and the texture is not uniformly smooth.
For example, there is stippling and scoring on the tablecloth, so that close up it looks like real fabric.
In addition, he did not add a ground layer to the painting.
This means that the paint actually sinks into the canvas, again making the tablecloth look like real cloth.
Another painted feature that looks realistic is the woodgrain.
He used a technique called "trompe-l’oeil," which means to trick or deceive the eye.
Gris was a master at tricking the eye into thinking it was seeing an actual object.
Another technique Gris used in his painting is the thick impasto brush strokes for the grapes.
Within the array of still-life objects, a bull appears.
Can you see it?
I’ll show it to you now.
The head is a V shape.
On the left, the white outline of the guitar forms a corniculate shape, that elicits one of the bull’s horns.
The beer bottle on the right evokes the other horn.
The bull’s nose and ring are formed with the teacup and saucer.
The black and white concentric circles are the bull’s eye, and he’s staring right at the viewer.
Visible on the wine bottle’s label are the letters “e-a-u.” The wine is a “Beaujolais” – a popular French wine.
This is a play on words because the last three letters of the French word for bull — taureau — are also "e-a-u."
His love of wordplay, mystery, and discovery were influenced by his favorite pulp fiction series, "Fantômas."
This popular series was about a master criminal named Fantômas who was never caught and
the stories always had cliffhanger endings. The series was written between 1911 and 1913.
Fantômas always disguised his features or wore a hood.
Gris enjoyed that and he featured Fantômas in several of his paintings.
He was captivated by how the character was shown, obscured and in disguise.
There is a parallel between Gris’s work and the Fantômas series.
There’s a great deal of deception, of leading you down various paths.
This is not a painting in which everything is immediately evident.
It requires a lot of detective-like work to decipher the painting, just as when reading the Fantômas series.
You may wonder why Gris included the bull and the target (bull’s eye) motifs.
One possible explanation is that a character in the Fantômas series was known as "Oeil-de-Boeuf,"
which means “bull’s eye” in French.
Is there a connection or is it just a coincidence? We don’t know.
Gris’ playfulness with visuals came to an end in the summer of 1915 due to World War I.
He did not see action, but he was deeply affected by the war.
He no longer created whimsical mysteries with hidden figures to detect.
Instead, his focus turned to somber themes and to the idea of truth.