Glass and Newspaper

This dates from 1917, the third winter of a war that reached Gris even though, as a Spaniard, he never had to fight in it. Foreigners in France were watched with suspicion, and canvas, fuel and food all ran short. Like a number of his pictures from these years, it is painted not on canvas but on plywood, a cheaper panel he could still get hold of. The objects are ordinary wartime table things, a glass and a folded newspaper, built up from flat interlocking planes. The newspaper is a direct memory of the papier collé years just before, when the Cubists had glued real strips of printed paper into their pictures. Here the print is painted rather than pasted, its lettering flattened into the design.