Bottle and Pitcher

In 1911 Cubism was still mostly a private affair, worked out in a handful of Montmartre studios and rarely seen in public. Gris was only just turning to painting in earnest, and like the friends whose experiments he watched daily, he reached for the plainest things on the table to test the new grammar. Here a bottle and a pitcher, ordinary studio props, are broken into tilted facets and painted in a narrow range of greys and browns. The light does not fall from one window. It seems to lift off the surfaces themselves, giving the glass and earthenware a faint metallic sheen. Look for the way a single object is shown from more than one side at once, its edges shifting as if you were moving around it. He was signing work like this just before he first exhibited in public, in 1912.