Juan Gris & Pablo Picasso - Cubist Rivalry Exhibition Poster

This poster carries Juan Gris’s Cubist portrait of Pablo Picasso: two Spaniards, two of Cubism’s central figures, rendered in interlocking planes and cool, structured geometry. It stands for one of the more charged relationships in early modern art.

Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and took a studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, the ramshackle Montmartre building where Picasso was already working. Both were Spaniards inventing and extending Cubism; Picasso, eight years older and fiercely protective of a movement he had founded with Georges Braque, never seems to have been entirely comfortable with the brilliant younger countryman a few doors down. Gris took Cubism somewhere cooler and more architectural than its inventors had — clearer colour, tighter structure, a deliberate sense of order that early Analytic Cubism had avoided.

The portrait of Picasso is among Gris’s earliest major Cubist statements, an act of homage and of measured self-assertion at once. When Gris died in 1927, aged only forty, accounts of Picasso’s reaction describe a grief tangled up with rivalry as much as loss. The two careers stayed bound together: one small Montmartre building, one of the decisive shifts in twentieth-century art, and a friendship that was never quite a friendship.

Our poster imagines a 1980s New York exhibition, Competitors & Collaborators in Cubism, at the Arfaa Art Institute, designed around Gris’s geometry and a restrained blue palette. The typography keeps out of the way, letting the fractured planes of the portrait carry the page.

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