Bottle of Beaune and a Fruit Dish 1917

Juan Gris made this cubist painting, Bottle of Beaune and a Fruit Dish, with oils, and it is in a private collection. I can almost feel Gris feeling his way through the planes of these objects. I'm thinking about that green bottle, how he let the white ground peek through in places, like a drawing. He must have pushed the paint around, adjusting, revising, and all those changes leave a trace of the painting's history right on the surface. I wonder if Gris was thinking about Cezanne, flattening space, or maybe he was more into the geometry of it all, breaking things down and building them back up in his own way. That little red dot, off center, near the middle, feels like a small mistake, or maybe it's totally deliberate, throwing off the balance of the whole thing. Whatever, it’s like a tiny act of defiance, a reminder that painting is as much about feeling and intuition, as it is about intellect.