The Basket

1924 was the year Gris stood up at the Sorbonne in Paris and tried to explain what he was after, in a lecture he called On the Possibilities of Painting. He described starting from pure geometry and working toward the object, rather than the other way round, and this still life shows that method at rest. The forms are calm and stable, the colour clear, the basket and the things around it set out with the almost classical order many French artists were reaching for after the war. It comes from the last stretch of his short life. Within three years he was dead of kidney disease at 40, still refining the same balanced, resolved still lifes he had lectured about that spring.