#collage

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.

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.