The short, bright career

Gris made this in the spring of 1914. Months later the First World War broke out, scattering the Cubist circle — Braque and many others to the front, the dealer Kahnweiler into exile as an enemy alien — and the great heroic phase of the movement was effectively over. Kahnweiler’s entire stock, Gris’s pictures among it, was seized by the French state as enemy property and later auctioned off cheaply, sending these works scattering through the market. Gris himself kept working, refining his clear, systematic style through the 1920s.

He did not get long. Juan Gris died in 1927, of kidney and heart disease, at just forty. For years his reputation sat in the shadow of the two founders — the careful one, the follower. That has steadily corrected itself: he is now seen as the third great Cubist and, to many eyes, the most lucid of the three. This Breakfast hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as very nearly the textbook example of what collage, handled with total discipline, could build — that calm blue-gray table, its wood-grain pasted rather than painted, its white cup unmistakably a cup.