Siphon and Fruitdish

The odd object in this 1920 still life is the siphon, a pressurised seltzer bottle with a metal top and a little spout, the thing a Paris cafe or bar used to fizz water into a glass. It was a modern, factory-made piece of equipment, and setting it beside a fruit dish, one of the oldest props in still-life painting, says something quiet about where Gris now stood. This is postwar work, made once the sharp experiments of prewar Cubism had settled into something more ordered and legible. The siphon and the dish are built from clean flat planes and clear colour, each object kept whole enough to name at a glance. The checked cloth and the rounded fruit give the eye somewhere soft to rest against all those straight edges.