Cubism made rigorous

Here is what sets Gris apart from the two men who invented the style. Picasso and Braque worked from the object inward: they took a real guitar or jug and analyzed it into pieces, feeling their way, improvising. Gris worked the other direction — from the structure outward. He began with an abstract scaffold of clean verticals and locked proportions, an almost architectural plan, and only then hung the cup, the pot and the paper onto it. He once put it almost exactly that way: he started with a cylinder and made it a bottle, rather than starting with a bottle. You can see the method in the coffee pot: split down one clean vertical seam, light on the left, shadow on the right — not a loose impression of a pot but a measured proof that one is there.

If the founders’ Cubism is jazz — two players trading improvisations — Gris’s is a fugue (a piece of music where every voice enters in strict, planned order). That is why his pictures feel so calm and so clear: nothing is searching, everything has been decided. It is, by most accounts, the most rigorous Cubism anyone made, and that rigour would feed straight into the clean machine-age design of the 1920s — the architect Le Corbusier’s Purism (a stripped-bare, ornament-free style) and the streamlined geometry of Art Deco.