Audio by Laura Green
Maker: Juan Gris (1887-1927)
Culture: Spanish
Title: Fruit Stand and Bottle
Date Made: 1916
Type: Painting
Materials: Oil on canvas
Measurements: 26 x 32 in.
Transcript:
I’ve been looking at this work a lot recently because it caught my eye in the museum a while ago. And whenever I’ve gone back, it’s been what I go to because I’m really drawn by the colors, especially this bright cobalt blue, the eggplant-y purple, the green, and especially this luminous quality that it has. There are gold touches to it that shine, and I think that’s why I come straight for it. And it has this sense of depth to it, even though it has geometric shapes, that otherwise might seem a little flat with those colors that give it that depth. I was looking at the work, and I went over to the labels to find out more information, and I saw that it was titled Fruit Stand and Bottle. And I think that that’s hilarious because I absolutely did not see that. It was such a shock to me that this could possibly represent a fruit stand and bottle, that he could be looking at that and then come up with this. So I looked at it a little bit longer, and I eventually did see the bottle. It’s kind of on the right-hand side, in green in those little points. And then immediately to the left of it is that fruit stand with an oval and a triangular bottom coming off of it, and then some sort of weird fruit on it, I’m not sure. And I started to see this table, in the brown with this grain. And so the title completely changed how I saw it. I had this totally different perspective of what it was, and then he changed it by telling me what it actually was.