Portrait de Madame Josette Gris (Portrait of Madame Josette Gris)

The early works of Juan Gris, who lived in Paris from 1906, were as a magazine illustrator. By the time he took part in the Salon des Independants in 1912, it was with Cubist pieces, in a style he would work on exclusively from that juncture. Towards 1916 his work had arrived at a formal purification, shedding the hermetic and fragmentary nature of his previous compositions to distil a synthesis of clarification. Gris identified the surface of the canvas with a “flat and coloured architecture” in which the form dominated the colour and the emotion. In these years he also experienced a particular “return to order” which, as Pablo Picasso would later do, entailed a reinterpretation of work by past masters, primarily Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne and Diego Velázquez. Considerable influences in Portrait de Madame Josette Gris (Portrait of Madame Josette Gris), the painter’s partner, originate from both Corot, from whom he takes the classical pyramidic composition, and Cézanne, with inspiration drawn clearly from the different portraits the French artist made of his wife, particularly Madame Cézanne au fauteuil jaune (1888–1890), and his concurrence with the posture of her hands crossed on her lap.

Raúl Martínez Arranz