Juan Gris was a Spanish painter and sculptor born in Madrid, Spain on March 23, 1887. Originally, his name was Jose Victoriano Gonzalez-Perez. He was known for his paintings in the Cubist style and producing sculptures. His works are praised by art critics as being some of the finest examples of cubist painting. In his paintings, he emphasized that every element of each painting should be considered with classical quality and balanced colors. Being born the thirteenth child of fourteen by father, Gregorio González and mother, Isabel Pérez, Gris began studying at a young age. He studied mechanical drawing and engineering at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas (School of Art and Manufacturing) from 1902 until 1904. He later then took painting lessons from a more academic Spanish artist, José Moreno Carbonero from 1904 to late 1905. Carbonero influenced Gris’ paintings to be completed in a more traditional style and a year later, in 1905, Jose Victoriano Gonzalez-Perez adopted the …show more content…
In 1917 he executed his only sculpture, a painted plaster Harlequin. Between 1917 and 1920 Gris introduced a new complexity in his art. He set up effects between objects and their shadows and reintroduced complicated plane-like intersections and unique colors and textures. In 1920, Gris fell ill but continued to create paintings.
In 1924 and 1925, his health continued to deteriorate. He suffered from many illnesses such as uremia, asthma, and cardiac problems. Though in those same years, Gris spent much of his time writing and lecturing on his views on painting. In 1924, he conveyed a paper at the Sorbonne, “Les Possibilités de la peinture” (On the Possibilities of Painting), which was later translated and published worldwide. He then died on May 11, 1927 in Boulogne-Billancourt of a severe asthma attack being only forty years old, leaving a wife, Josette and a son,