Two After Juan Gris, by Jonathan Blunk

Houses in Paris, Place Ravignan, by Juan Gris (Spain) 1911–12

Against the Wind
 
The painting is a tall window I can lean out of. On the hill of Montmartre, sunlight falls at an angle upon chestnut trees that huddle in domed conspiracies, breathing with the clouds. Everything bends against some wind, buoyant wooden ships tossed on waves, pliant and billowing as canvas sails. Housefronts the same elongated shapes as three odd windows, with diamond-shaped roofs shuddering like kites. Shadows lift everything into light, a watery blue above the clouds and sheltered in street alcoves, shadows in triangles, curving away. 
 
The most precious pigment glows where light falls brightest, whitening earthen browns into the scalded sand of beige roses. It must be in summer; the trees are so full. Late morning with the sun breaking through after hard rain, the air fresh and the day stretched out ahead. A lightness comes to his brush. Even the darkest shadows hold promise, pitched into the wind.
 

Still Life before an Open Window, Place Ravignan, by Juan Gris (Spain) 1915

 Pitched at an Angle, the Table
​ 
1.
On rue Ravignan, the blue evening carves shadows into chestnut trees beyond the window. A wrought-iron grille frames a different canvas. Light survives in strips and shards, bright emerald and ruby, a glowing canopy of leaves. The window squares a world: a book, a glass, a bottle of Médoc, each fastened by an image of itself, headlines unending, a wineglass forever half-full, the war far off, the street empty.
 
No one has passed by in years. The street lies waiting, propped open like a book. Objects come to rest on the table, saved from gravity and the darkening street, now ultramarine. Pitched at an angle, the table grants permanence. It stands always in Gris’s studio—one of the few things he kept from Le Bateau-Lavoir.
 
2.
In June 1915, a window shutter folds into the room, unable to keep out the cobalt light. Evening comes, streetlamps unlit, cloaked in juniper and gray. In Paris, explosions survive by second and third hand; farther east, genocide in Armenia. Le Journal doesn’t mention this. The food, the coal, the light—all rationed.
 
Night collapses into the room. Iron fencing, at first transparent, turns now opaque. Wallpaper braces the walls, keeping the world at bay. Objects grow heavier under stubborn evening light, boots caught in mud.
 
3.
Gertrude Stein would remember the first time she entered the studio where Gris was to live out his martyrdom.
 
Max Jacob names it Le Bateau-Lavoir: filthy, wooden tenements moored uncertainly to the hill. Looking for Picasso, Kahnweiler sees Gris sketching in a window. The dealer always found Gris hard at work in the small studio to the left of the door to the street. What struck one about his face were his very large brown eyes, the whites of which were bluish. That strange blue in a cracked mirror above the washbowl, in the jagged planes of Gris’s face.
 
In a shop at the far corner of the square, a carpenter works, as though raising the backdrop for a painting. With the window open, Gris hears the rhythmic hammer-blows.
 

Jonathan Blunk

Author's note: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s quote in part 3 is from his Gris: Life and Work. Gertrude Stein is quoted from her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Jonathan Blunk’s authorized biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), earned praise from The New York Times Book Review, where it was an Editors’ Choice. The Georgia Review has published his essays and reviews, including forthcoming work. Blunk’s poems have appeared in FIELD and other journals, most recently in Nixes Mate Review.