Juan Gris

Pablo Picasso Juan Gris Georges Braque Pompidou Plans a Roving Museum Sotheby's Scores Bilbao, the Sequel? Season Opens Softly at Christie’s From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips

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Juan Gris is cubism’s third pillar. Born in Madrid in 1887, Gris, who began his career as a caricaturist, arrived in Paris in 1906 in time to witness the Cubist revolution, marked by the austere, hermetic, ochre canvases of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. By 1912, Gris had made this pictorial language his own, flooding the closed room of high Cubism with color and light and developing an individual approach to spatial analysis. Over the next five years, he created several of the movement’s most distinctive works. "There is no question that Picasso and Braque invented Cubism," says Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "but Gris got [involved] soon after, and in an exquisite way." In his paintings, she notes, he "has a palette that is more exuberant and multifaceted than Picasso’s or Braque’s."

Last November, at Christie’s otherwise disappointing evening Impressionist and modern sale in New York, a 1915 still life by Gris, Livre, pipe et verres, set a record for the artist, overshooting its estimate of $12.5 million to $18.5 million to fetch the Picasso-level price of $20.8 million. "It was an interesting moment," says Guy Bennett, the senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s. "There had been a lot of turmoil in the markets leading up to this sale." The painting — marked by an elegant use of wood-grained angular planes, with dashes of purple and green — had "a sort of dazzling visual effect as it hung on the wall," he recalls. When the bidding ended, the room broke into applause.

Although Bennett claims that the huge sum fetched "really speaks for the work," others find it grossly inflated. Among them is Isabel Fernández-Montesinos, a director at Madrid’s Galería Elvira González, which handles pieces by modern and contemporary Spanish artists, including Gris. Fernández-Montesinos believes that despite being "very beautiful, very complex," the record-setting painting is not the artist’s best. She terms the vast gap between its price and the £3.9 million ($8 million) paid in February 2008 at Christie’s London for the superior 1917 Violon et journal (est. £3.5-£4.5 million; $7-9 million) outrageous. The latter work is characterized by Gris’s mature, almost architectural approach to deriving complexity from still lifes.

In fact, the most recent auction results for Gris’s work suggest that the November figure is an aberration rather than a trend indicator. In February’s celebrated sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé at Christie’s Paris, the artist’s mid-1914 collage Tasse et pipe (est. €1-1.5 million; $1.3-1.9 million) made €1.1 million ($1.4 million), barely surpassing its low estimate. And his beautifully executed 1913 Le violon, a field of intersecting planes painted in a spectrum of pinks, blues and browns, actually missed its low estimate of €4 million ($5.1 million), going for €3.9 million ($5 million).

Whatever debate there is over the price tag to affix to Gris’s works, there is deep consensus about one aspect of his market: Only seven or eight of the artist’s 17 creative years before his death, in 1927, at age 40 of kidney failure, produced works worth serious consideration. Gris’s 1977 catalogue raisonné, the life’s work of collector and critic Douglas Cooper, lists 621 painted works. The most highly valued of these, as measured by auction performance, are the ones done between 1911, when Gris began dabbling in Cubism, and 1919, when he, along with the rest of the French avant-garde, were turning from formal experimentation to harmonious composition. Paintings completed after 1919 fetch much less than earlier ones. At a day sale at Christie’s London in June 2007, for instance, the sentimental 1924 oil Arlequin et Pierrot (est. £200-300,000; $396-594,000) went for £240,000 ($476,000).