Pasted, not painted

Look closely at this breakfast table and a lot of it is not paint at all. Gris built the picture by gluing: two different kinds of cheap, factory-printed wood-grain paper filling the lower two-thirds as the table and its turned legs, and a strip of printed decorative wallpaper across the top for the wall behind. Onto and around those pasted papers he then drew and painted the rest — the coffee pot, the cup, the glasses. The technique has a name carried over from Braque: papier collé, “pasted paper.”

It is the same joke Picasso had played with his oilcloth chair-caning, raised to a whole composition. The “wood” of the table is not painted to look like wood and is not wood — it is a printed picture of wood, mass-produced by the roll, glued down flat. A manufactured fake of timber stands in for a real café table, and Gris lets the seams and edges show, so you always know you are looking at pasted paper, not an illusion.

What makes it Gris rather than Picasso is the control. The pasted papers are cut to crisp, deliberate shapes and locked into a tight grid; the drawing laid over them is precise, almost engineered. Nothing is improvised or scrubbed. He has taken the most casual-seeming gesture in art — sticking down a scrap of paper — and made it as exact as a blueprint.