Pipe, Bowl and Spoon

A pipe, a bowl and a spoon on a table, about as plain a set of things as a painter could choose. By 1920 Gris had pushed his Cubism to its most ordered and almost engineered, and he thought about painting the reverse of how most people do. Cézanne, he liked to say, turned a bottle into a cylinder. Gris started from the cylinder and worked back toward one particular bottle. So a still life like this does not begin with the objects in front of him and then simplify them. It begins with flat, interlocking planes, arranged until they balance, and only then are they coaxed into becoming things you can name. The round of the bowl, the stem of the pipe and the little spoon arrive at the end of that process. Even the wood of the table and the shadows are cut to the same geometry, so the humblest objects in the house end up built like a piece of cabinetwork.