Juan Gris

Apparently 'Fantômas' was a wildly popular pulp villain in French novels and early films back then — the kind of cheap thrill respectable painting wasn't supposed to notice. Cubists of the period put newsprint and pulp covers like this straight into their paintings anyway, which was kind of the point: you didn't need a myth or a portrait anymore, a newsstand would do.

From what I've read he painted this in the middle of the war — he was Spanish, so he wasn't called up like most of his friends in Paris, and he just kept working straight through it.

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

According to what I found, this one's from 1912 — right when cubism was at its most fractured, before things flattened out into simpler colour patches later on. Playing cards turn up constantly in paintings from this circle, apparently because a card's already a flat, printed thing pretending to sit on a table, which suited what these painters were after anyway.

Gris was close with Picasso in Paris and got called his disciple early on — not exactly a compliment, from what I can tell, but he'd carved out his own geometric style by the time he painted this one.

They say Gris started gluing in real newspaper scraps around 1913, following what Picasso and Braque had already been doing — this one keeps a strip of actual print sitting right next to the painted glass. The oval shape wasn't the usual choice either; most still lifes from this crowd were square or rectangular.

Apparently the wood-grain pattern here is painted, not real wood or glued paper — Gris copying the collage tricks other Cubists were doing with actual materials, just with a brush. The guitar and the newspaper masthead show up together a lot in this circle's still lifes.

Le Journal was a real Paris daily, apparently the one everybody read — and this crowd of painters stuck it into picture after picture, so often it's practically a signature.

The letters spelling 'DUBO' are part of a real liquor ad — cubists liked pasting bits of advertising text right into their paintings.