Glass and Checkerboard
Juan Gris Spanish
Not on view
The flattened planes and diverse materials of Cubist pictures are anything but illusionistic. Yet look again. For his fragmented checkerboard, Gris fashioned a delicate marquetry with inlaid pieces of faux bois wallpaper. As two-dimensional as the depicted scene may be, delicate shading conjures the thickness of the checkerboard along its top edge and the thinness of the stippled white paper plane below, which lifts ever so slightly off the tabletop. A Cubist glass, with its cup, stem, and base schematically rendered, sits at the edge of the table—or do we see two? The excessively large shadow to its right takes on a life of its own, to sinister or comic effect.
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