In honor of Spanish surrealist painter Juan Gris’s 125th birthday, Google is celebrating with a colorful new Doodle. The search engine replaced its official logo on its homepage with a new Doodle using the cubist imagery he helped pioneer. It features stylized representations of musical instruments, components that represent his surrealist work.
By 1910, Gris developed his own cubist style, which often features jagged and angular arrangements. The arrangements, which were often objects or people, are painted using a palette of muted tones. The objects are broken and re-assembled in an abstract form, so that multiple viewpoints of the same objects are represented. The objects intersect at odd angles and on different planes.
Gris was born Jose Victoriano Carmelo Carlos Conzalex-Perez on March 23, 1887 in Madrid. He studied art in Spain, but moved to Paris in 1906, where he became a friend and contemporary of such artists Henri Matisse and Amodeo Modigliani.
After becoming acquainted with fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso, Gris, whose painting Violon et Guitare sold for $26.4 million at a New York auction in 2010, started to view him as a mentor. Gris also painted what was considered the first cubist work that wasn’t completed by Picasso or French painter Georges Braque, the 1912 Portrait of Picasso. Gris died on May 11, 1927, at the age of 40, after suffering from chronic kidney failure.
Written by: Karen Benardello
