The Violin

When Gris painted this in 1916, the Paris art trade he leaned on had fallen apart. His dealer, the German-born Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, had fled to Switzerland when the war began, and the monthly income Kahnweiler paid him stopped at once. That year Gris signed instead with Léonce Rosenberg, who kept the tight, geometric wing of Cubism going through the fighting. The subject is a familiar one for these painters, a violin, but here it is taken apart and rebuilt from flat overlapping planes, its scroll and strings folded into the same shallow depth as the table beneath. Rosenberg showed pictures like this at his gallery L'Effort Moderne, one of the few rooms in wartime Paris still buying Cubist work.