Playing Cards and Siphon

This one is unusually wide, about 116 centimetres across, and it is laid out like the top of a café table seen close up. The objects are the furniture of a Parisian café in 1916: a few playing cards fanned out, and a soda siphon, the pressurised glass bottle used to fizz water into a drink. Gris renders the siphon so you catch both its glassy body and the metal cap at its neck. By this point he had tightened his Cubism into flat, firmly bolted planes that later writers called crystal Cubism, and the wide shape lets those planes spread out sideways in a calm horizontal band. The palette stays sober, greys and browns with cooler notes. Read the fanned cards toward the left and you can still pick out the pale rectangles one behind another.