The Bag of Coffee

The reason this hangs in Basel rather than Paris is a Basel-born banker named Raoul La Roche. Working in Paris, La Roche spent the 1910s and 1920s buying Cubist pictures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris, and in 1952 he gave around 90 of them to this museum. Gris painted the coffee bag in 1920, with the war over and Paris settling back into ordinary life. The subject is exactly that, ordinary: a paper sack of coffee of the kind a grocer would twist shut, set on a table among a few plain objects. He gives this humble thing the same careful geometry he would give a guitar or a violin, the planes locking together in clear, flat colour. La Roche knew Gris personally and went on buying from him to the end.