Damier et cartes à jouer (Checkerboard and Playing Cards)

Juan Gris

1916

On View in Gertrude Bernoudy Gallery, Room 3

The Spanish artist Juan Gris was a leading Cubist painter practicing in France in the early twentieth century. Like the work of his fellow artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who pioneered the Cubist approach of painting fragmented objects from multiple perspectives at once, Gris focused on the relationship between dimensional forms and the flat canvas. In this painting familiar Cubist images—a glass, a napkin, playing cards, and a checkerboard—are rendered as flat, colored planes that closely overlap. During the mid-1910s, when he executed this work, Gris began his paintings with arbitrarily placed color fields, into which he introduced references to identifiable objects in such a way that their relation to different surfaces is difficult to ascertain. The checkerboard and glass, for example, are partially transparent, intersecting with the grounds on which they appear. [Permanent collection label, 2019. Revised 2023]

Artist Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887–1927)
Title Damier et cartes à jouer (Checkerboard and Playing Cards)
Date 1916
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions unframed | 28 7/8 x 23 3/4 in.
Credit line University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1946
Object number WU 3790

Technique oil painting
Work type painting

Currently on View Gertrude Bernoudy Gallery, Room 3

Picasso to Pollock: H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, Texas), 08/17/2004 - 10/24/2004

Collecting Patterns
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 09/05/2003 - 12/07/2003

H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (New York, New York), 03/12/2002 - 04/06/2002
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 08/30/2002 - 12/08/2002

Cubism and Abstraction
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/12/1998 - 04/05/1998

Abstract Expressionism: American Art in the 1950s and 1960s
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/17/1997 - 04/06/1997

A Gallery of Modern Art
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 08/09/1994 - 10/16/1994

Juan Gris
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, California), 02/01/1984 - 04/08/1984
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, New York), 05/18/1984 - 07/14/1984
National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 10/16/1983 - 12/31/1983

Cubists, Surrealists, and Expressionists

Capsule of Modern Art
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 01/09/1983 - 03/06/1983

The Centennial Exhibition
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 05/15/1981 - 10/11/1981

Cubist, Expressionist, and Surrealist Paintings and Sculptures

Celebration, Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art, 10/26/1974 - 01/05/1975

Modern Masters of Spanish Painting: Legacy of Spain, XXth Century
Timken Museum of Art (San Diego, California), 01/02/1969 - 03/04/1969
San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, California), 01/02/1969 - 03/04/1969

Juan Gris
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 03/13/1966 - 04/08/1966

Washington University Collection of Modern Paintings and Sculpture from Daumier to Pollock
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 04/06/1966 - 05/08/1966

Fifty Years of Modern Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio), 06/06/1966 - 07/31/1966

Years of Ferment: The Birth of Twentieth Century Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art, 07/13/1965 - 08/22/1965
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 03/28/1965 - 05/16/1965
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 01/24/1965 - 03/07/1965

Opening Exhibition of Mark C. Steinberg Memorial Hall
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 04/29/1960

Juan Gris
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 09/29/1958 - 10/26/1958
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 08/11/1958 - 09/14/1958
Minneapolis Institute of Art, 06/24/1958 - 07/29/1958
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 04/09/1958 - 06/01/1958

A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of Juan Gris, 1887–1927 [verify]
Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, Ohio), 04/30/1948 - 05/31/1948

Picasso, Gris, Miro: The Spanish Masters of Twentieth Century Painting
Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Oregon), 10/26/1948 - 11/28/1948
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 09/14/1948 - 10/17/1948

French Painting
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana), 01/25/1947 - 03/03/1947

Four Spaniards
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, Massachusetts)

Juan Gris Retrospective
Buchholz Gallery (New York, New York), 03/28/1944 - 04/22/1944

A Selection of Works by Twentieth Century Artists
Renaissance Society of Chicago, 06/20/1934 - 08/20/1934

Juan Gris
Marie Harriman Gallery (New York, New York), 02/05/1932

School of Paris 1910–1928
Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 03/20/1929 - 04/12/1929

H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art 2002

1946
Theodore Schempp, New York

Inscription [LL:] Juan Gris 8-16

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