Guitar, Book and Newspaper

The reason so much fine Cubism now hangs in Basel comes down largely to one man, Raoul La Roche, a banker born in the city who spent his working life in Paris. In the early 1920s, advised by the architect Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant, he began buying Cubist pictures, among them works by Gris like this one. From 1952 onward La Roche gave around 90 of his paintings to the Kunstmuseum Basel, which is why a visitor in Switzerland can stand before a Paris still life of 1920. Gris set a guitar, a book and a folded newspaper on a table and cut them into flat, fitted planes, keeping the sound-hole and the newsprint legible so the eye can still find each object. It has hung in Basel, far from the studio table where it was arranged, since La Roche let it go.