The Table
The Table (1914) by Juan Gris is an example of papier collé (cut and pasted paper), a form of collage that was first used by Cubist painter Georges Braque in Fruit Dish and Glass (1912). Following the example Braque and Pablo Picasso, Gris began experimenting with collage in 1913. In The Table, he created a complex structure of intersecting diagonals, verticals, and horizontals within a perfect oval, that suggested the shape of the table. In the work, Gris incorporated a fragmented headline of a newspaper article, ‘Le Vrai et le Faux’, which means ‘the true and the false’ in French. In this way, the artist made a playful statement, communicating to the viewer that the subject of the painting is the contradiction of truths and falsehoods.
In addition to the newspaper, Gris also pasted book pages onto the canvas. The pages pasted at the bottom of the painting were from one of the Fantômas novels written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. The novels center around the character Fantômas, a master criminal and ruthless killer that spreads terror across Paris. The crime novels deal with the mysterious identity of Fantômas, and like the newspaper headline, it relates to the idea of truths and falsehoods. This is not the first time the artist incorporated pages of contemporary literature into his work. In The watch (1912), Gris pasted on the canvas titles of two poems, Le Pont Mirabeau and L’Enfer by the influential French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. This practice was a way to give the painting additional layers of meaning, and art historian Christopher Green noted that Gris works often contained vague references to himself. For example, in Breakfast (1914) the word ‘Gris’ is pasted under the letters ‘ourn’, that were pasted from a newspaper headline. The letters ‘ourn’ are a phonetic imitation of the artist’s name ‘Juan’. Similarly, in Musician’s Table (1914), Gris combined two different headlines to refer to the mounting tensions around the world, as well as the mounting rivalry between his Cubists colleagues, Picasso and Braque.
In the case of The Table (1914), some have suggested that Gris referred to his status in the Cubist art movement. Gris had great admiration for Picasso and Braque, the two founders of Cubism. He was six years younger than the two artists, and he devoted his full attention to painting only in 1911. The following year he made his artistic debut at the Salon of Independent Artists with The Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912). Even though Gris's artworks were on par in terms of quality with those of Picasso and Braque, many of his contemporaries did not see him as an equal of them. It is reasonable to assume Gris felt overlooked, thus the idea of truths and falsehoods in The Table was a way to assert that he is a ‘true’ Cubist worthy of acknowledgment. True to the Cubist spirit, The Table functions like a puzzle: the artist leaves hints for the viewer to decipher the mysterious meaning of the artwork.
