Still Life on a Chair

A chair appears alongside a jug and other objects, broken into geometric shapes rendered in brown, blue, black, and white tones, set against a wooden floor. The composition sits within the still life genre, built from fractured planes typical of cubism. Juan Gris painted this piece in 1917, and it is held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne. Gris, a Spanish artist who lived from 1887 to 1927, worked within the cubist movement and also created the piece known as Carafe and Book. Looking closely, the wooden flooring grounds the fragmented shapes, giving the eye a steady plane beneath the scattered angular forms of the chair and jug.