Google Doodle honours cubist artist Juan Gris

Internet search giant Google is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of cubist painter and sculptor Juan Gris with a Google Doodle on its homepage in the style of the artist’s work.

The colourful Google Doodle – a stylised Google logo – features imagery relating to music in Gris’ cubist style – an artistic genre he helped pioneer – using angular arrangements of objects. Musical instruments have been components of Gris’ work.

Gris was born José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez in Madrid, Spain, on 23 March 1887. He studied art in Spain and then moved to Paris in 1906, becoming a friend and peer to artists such as Henri Matisse and Amodeo Modigliani, and an acquaintance of Pablo Picasso, whom Gris regarded as his mentor.

In 1912, Gris painted Portrait of Picasso, which has been claimed to be the first cubist work not painted by Picasso himself or painter Georges Braque.

Gris is considered the third “co-founder” cubism, an abstract art movement, along with Picasso and Braque.

Some of Gris’ famous works include The Red Book, The Blue Tablecloth, Woman at a Window and Woman with a Basket.

Gris died on 11 May 1927 in Boulogne-sur-Seine at age 40, after suffering from chronic kidney failure.

^{Portrait of Picasso by Juan Gris. Image from Wikimedia Commons}