Still Life: The Table
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.Like Chalfant in Which Is Which?, Gris used a newspaper clipping (in this case, an actual one) to engage the viewer in discerning “[L]E VR[AI] ET LE FAUX” (The true and the false), as the headline reads. Multiple layers of fiction ensue, as Gris draws phantasmal representations of a pipe, a glass, and bottles over solid wood-grain wallpaper that masquerades as a tabletop. A book lies open to a verifiable page, but the hefty volume is pure illusion. The artist pilfered the text from L’agent secret (The Secret Agent, 1911), one of a series of best-selling whodunits by French authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre that feature the criminal Fantômas, a master of disguises. The beguiling key cannot unlock the drawer because the “keyhole” is merely its own cast shadow.
Artwork Details
- Title: Still Life: The Table
- Artist: Juan Gris (Spanish, Madrid 1887–1927 Boulogne-sur-Seine)
- Date: 1914
- Geography: (none assigned
- Medium: Cut-and-pasted printed wallpapers, printed wove paper, newspaper, conté crayon, gouache, wax crayon, and laid papers on newspaper mounted on canvas
- Dimensions: 23 1/2 × 17 1/2 in. (59.7 × 44.5 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952
- Rights and Reproduction: Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art