Breakfast
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.The table in this domestic breakfast scene is laid with printed wallpapers and brims with autobiographical references, mainly the coffee-drinking accessories and the actual Café Eugène Martin label. Gris’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler remarked that the artist was an excessive consumer of caffeine. A fortuitous newspaper fragment provides the ready-made signature “GRIS” while the letters “OURN,” excerpted from the masthead of Le Journal, form a homophonic pun on “Juan.” The name Juan Gris (or “John Gray”) proved to be the finest fiction of all, for it was but a pseudonym for the man born in 1887 as José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Peréz.
Artwork Details
- Title: Breakfast
- Artist: Juan Gris (Spanish, Madrid 1887–1927 Boulogne-sur-Seine)
- Date: 1914
- Medium: Cut-and-pasted printed wallpaper, newspaper, transparentized paper, white laid paper, gouache, oil, and wax crayon on canvas
- Dimensions: 31 7/8 × 23 1/2 in. (80.9 × 59.7 cm)
- Classification: Collages
- Credit Line: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 1948
- Rights and Reproduction: © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art