Fruit Bowl, Pipe and Journal

This one is painted not on canvas but on a panel of plywood, and the support suits the picture. Paris in 1917 was short of everything, and a smooth board was cheaper and steadier than stretched linen. It also gave Gris a hard, even surface for the kind of work he was making then, his tightest and most architectural, with the fruit bowl, the pipe and the folded newspaper cut into flat planes that fit together without a wasted edge. He worked by plan rather than improvising, setting out the shapes almost like a draughtsman before he laid on the paint. The wood took the flat colour cleanly and kept the joins crisp. Watch the pipe, its stem and bowl reduced to a couple of simple shapes yet still unmistakably a pipe, the everyday thing that holds the geometry to the table it rests on.