The Spanish painter Juan Gris (1887-1927) is one of the major cubist painters. His work is distinguished by its lucidity and austerity.

Juan Gris, whose real name was José Victoriano Gonzalez, was born in Madrid on March 23, 1887. He studied engineering at Madrid's School of Arts and Sciences. He also took painting lessons with the minor academic artist José Maria Carbonero and sold humorous drawings to local newspapers.

Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and remained in France the rest of his life. He had skipped military service, so he could not return to Spain. He settled in the Bateau Lavoir, a tenement that housed many painters, critics, and poets, and there he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Maurice Raynal. Gris produced his first cubist paintings in 1911-1912; they were in the analytical cubist vein of Braque and Picasso but characterized by a...