Pierrot with Guitar 1925

Juan Gris made this Pierrot with Guitar, likely with oil on canvas, but I don't know exactly when. What gets me about this painting is the cool way Gris makes his tones shift within a relatively muted palette; like he mixes a little gray into every color. You can really see this in the way he renders the costume of the Pierrot, the subtle shifts of tone and the understated color create a cool effect. The paint isn't too thick, but you can still see the way the brush moves across the surface to define planes. Look at the hands of the Pierrot, so softly rendered but still very clearly defined. This kind of understated color, this use of tonal variation reminds me a bit of Morandi, but with this added layer of cubist fragmentation that is so characteristic of Gris's work. It's a reminder that art is a conversation, that artists are always in dialogue with one another, across time and space.