Jose Victoriano Gonzalez

1887 - Juan Gris, born on the 23rd of March in Madrid, whose original name was Jose Victoriano Gonzalez, was a Spanish painter whose lucidly composed still lifes are major works of the style called Synthetic Cubism.

1902 - 1904 - He studied engineering at the Madrid School of Arts and Manufactures but soon began making drawings for newspapers in the sensuously curvilinear Art Nouveau style.

1906 - He moved to Paris and settled in Montmartre in the Bateau-Lavoir, an artists' dwelling where his compatriot Pablo Picasso lived.

1910 - He did his first significant paintings and adopted the Cubist style the following year.

1912 - The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler agreed to purchase his entire artistic output.

1913 - 1914 - He arrived at a personal and mature version of Synthetic Cubism characterized by rigorously geometrical compositions in which fragmented objects and sharp-edged planes are articulated with maximum clarity.

1921 - 1927 - He transformed his Synthetic Cubist idiom so that his style became increasingly free and lyrical.

1927 - He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris) in the spring on the 11th of May at the age of forty, leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges.