Portrait of Pablo Picasso
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | The painting is located in Gallery 391 of the Modern Art Department at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. |
| Location History: | It originally debuted in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1912. After decades of changing hands among private collectors, it permanently relocated to the USA in 1958. |
The Spanish master, Juan Gris (1887-1927), is credited to be the defining masterpiece of Analytic Cubism with ‘Portrait of Pablo Picasso’ (Hommage à Pablo Picasso). In 1906, Gris went to Paris and lived at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre in direct contact with Picasso and Georges Braque. This painting received its first exhibition in March 1912 at the Salon des Indépendants and was greeted by the critics with an approving and impressive verdict that made of Gris a formidable voice in the Cubist movement. In Analytical Cubism, Picasso and Braque employed intuitive, broken planes but Gris brought a strict mathematical order. He, on the other hand, breaks down the head, neck and torso into geometric elements, and the whole picture plane is marked with diagonal grid lines. Gris's portrait of Picasso seated, holding an artist's palette, only uses cool blues, warm browns and crystalline grays. The contrast of these neutral tones generates an inside light and surface rhythm within the work, which is unique to Gris's style compared to the monochromatic, dry schemes of early Cubism. Gris inscribed “Hommage à Pablo Picasso” in a literal manner on the page in the bottom right corner. This is a double act, acting as a recognition of Picasso as an inventor of Cubism and a claim of Gris's own as a full-fledged painter in the Parisian avant-garde. This portrait is frequently included in art historians' lists of the best early 20th-century European portraits, alongside Picasso's 1910 portraits of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Ambroise Vollard.