Cubism: ‘Petits Cubes’ showcases paintings, drawings and sculptures by the originators of the movement, including Picasso and Juan Gris. Picasso is represented by a highly important, large-scale still life, Mandoline et portée de musique (1923/24), painted in the South of France. Its illustrious provenance includes such names as Paul Rosenberg, G. David Thompson and Ernst Beyeler, among others. This will be joined by four works by Juan Gris, foremost among them another large still life, Nature Morte (1916). This Synthetic Cubist work, incorporating Pointilist ‘confetti’ dots, belonged first to Léonce Rosenberg and later, for half a century, to notable American collector Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman. Gris is further represented by a second Cubist still life, Le Raisin noir (1923); and by two works on paper, L’Homme à la guitare (1918) and Jean le musician (1921).
Two table-top bronzes by Henri Laurens, the early, angular Femme couchée au miroir (1922) and later, more curved Femme à la draperie (1928), illustrate the evolution of Laurens’s style. The artist is also represented by a work on paper, Buste de femme au collier de perles (1920). Cubism is rounded out by two additional works on paper: Fernand Léger’s lively drawing Coquillages et Profil (1928); and Albert Gleizes’s Downtown (1916), in which the New York Metropolis inspired him to approach abstraction without severing all ties to representation.