Head of a Man with Cigar

Juan Gris's Head of a Man with Cigar (c. 1912) is a charcoal drawing with stray white gouache on tan laid paper. This drawing shows a male figure with a cigar, a subject that Gris treated in several works. The head is rendered in the Cubist manner: the features are broken down and reassembled, the forms are geometrized, the space is ambiguous. The charcoal technique allows for rich blacks and subtle gradations of tone. The touches of white gouache add highlights and accents. The tan laid paper provides a warm ground. This drawing belongs to the period when Gris was establishing himself as a Cubist painter, and it shows his engagement with the human figure through the Cubist vocabulary. The cigar, with its associations of masculine sophistication, adds a note of character to the abstracted features. The Head of a Man with Cigar is both a Cubist exercise in the analysis of form and a portrait that captures the character of its subject.

Gris's Cubist portraits demonstrate the movement's ability to address the traditional genre of portraiture through the revolutionary techniques of formal analysis and reconstruction.

This charcoal drawing of a head with a cigar transforms the traditional portrait through the Cubist vocabulary of geometric forms and fragmented planes, the cigar adding a note of character to the abstracted features.