Juan Gris Quotes

Learn more about the man behind the art with these insightful quotes from the life of Spanish artist, Juan Gris. There are additional comments from related figures about his own career achievements.

Famous Quotes by Juan Gris

Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle a particular bottle out of a cylinder.

Cubism is moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

Four years partly illness much perfection and rejoining beauty and perfection and then at the end there came a definite creation of something. This is what is to be measured.

I always pet a dog with my left hand because if he bit me I'd still have my right hand to paint with.

I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.

I prefer the emotion that corrects the rule.

I try to make concrete that which is abstract.

Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.

The instant you know what the result will be, you are lost.

You are lost the moment you know what the result will be.

Quotes about Juan Gris by Art Historians and Fellow Artists

This Juan Gris, who lived only a short time, had little good fortune and never pushed his way to the fore, was one of the very great ones. His place is next to those painters whom he loved, next to Jean Fouquet, Mathieu Le Nain, Boucher, Ingres, Cezanne.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler - Juan Gris' main dealer and close friend

Even as a student he covered his notebooks with caricatures of his professors and classmates.

Douglas Cooper, discussing his love of drawing as a young student

There were neither speeches nor a religious ceremony, but in the procession which filed down the Avenue de la Reine to the old cemetery of Boulogne were all those who had known Gris - painters, sculptors, poets and musicians. The chief mourners were his son Georges, Lipchitz, Picasso, Raynal and myself.

Kahnweiler, describing his funeral