Breakfast

Juan Gris Spanish

Not on view

The table in this domestic breakfast scene is laid with printed wallpapers and brims with autobiographical references, mainly the coffee-drinking accessories and the actual Café Eugène Martin label. Gris’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler remarked that the artist was an excessive consumer of caffeine. A fortuitous newspaper fragment provides the ready-made signature “GRIS” while the letters “OURN,” excerpted from the masthead of Le Journal, form a homophonic pun on “Juan.” The name Juan Gris (or “John Gray”) proved to be the finest fiction of all, for it was but a pseudonym for the man born in 1887 as José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Peréz.

Breakfast, Juan Gris (Spanish, Madrid 1887–1927 Boulogne-sur-Seine), Cut-and-pasted printed wallpaper, newspaper, transparentized paper, white laid paper, gouache, oil, and wax crayon on canvas

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