The White Tablecloth 1912 - 1916

Juan Gris created this still life, ‘The White Tablecloth,’ in a style known as Synthetic Cubism. Born in Spain, Gris spent most of his working life in France, and his art reflects the cultural melting pot that Paris had become by the 1920s. Still life had become a popular form with modern painters. Everyday objects were easy to access. However, Gris presents them as geometrical forms, flattening them into the picture plane. This was a deliberate strategy of the Cubists to challenge the art academies' traditional emphasis on illusionism. Instead, Gris uses the art to make you think about art, the act of looking, and the way painting could challenge our assumptions about the world. To understand art like this better, we must go beyond the surface and understand how historical and cultural institutions shaped the artist's world and how they in turn tried to challenge those institutions.