Bottle and Fruit Bowl (Bottle, Newspaper and Fruit Bowl)

There is a newspaper in this still life, and the interesting thing is that it is painted. A few years earlier Gris and the other Cubists had glued real newsprint straight onto the canvas, scraps of daily life pressed into the picture. Here the paper, the bottle and the fruit bowl are all built by hand from flat interlocking shapes, and the lettering of the journal is brushed on rather than pasted, a quiet reversal of the old trick of fooling the eye. Gris painted it in 1916, in a Paris the war had emptied of the other Cubists. He would set a few objects on a table and break them into planes of colour that slot together like joinery, keeping just enough of each thing so you can still name it, the curve of the bowl, the neck of the bottle. The brushed headline lies among them as flat as everything else, the trace of a real morning paper folded on the table.