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We look down at a wooden tabletop with two playing cards among stacked rectangles and wedges in this vertical, abstract painting. The two playing cards we can make out are a four of diamonds to our left and an ace of clubs to our right. The ace shifts from the traditional black club on a white background to a moss-green club on a black background on the top half. The other rectangles could be upside-down cards, though they are larger in scale than the face-up playing cards. These shapes are made with pea-green dots on a black background, areas of textured silvery olive green, and sky blue. The cards lie on a mostly complete corner of a table painted with wood grain, but triangles of wood grain, green polka dots, and blue intersect and bisect each other. A wide fern-green form with rounded lobes hanging from it fills the upper left corner, perhaps representing a tree. The area to its right is filled with baby blue edged with white. The artist signed the lower right, “Juan Gris.”
Read the visual description

We look down at a wooden tabletop with two playing cards among stacked rectangles and wedges in this vertical, abstract painting. The two playing cards we can make out are a four of diamonds to our left and an ace of clubs to our right. The ace shifts from the traditional black club on a white background to a moss-green club on a black background on the top half. The other rectangles could be upside-down cards, though they are larger in scale than the face-up playing cards. These shapes are made with pea-green dots on a black background, areas of textured silvery olive green, and sky blue. The cards lie on a mostly complete corner of a table painted with wood grain, but triangles of wood grain, green polka dots, and blue intersect and bisect each other. A wide fern-green form with rounded lobes hanging from it fills the upper left corner, perhaps representing a tree. The area to its right is filled with baby blue edged with white. The artist signed the lower right, “Juan Gris.”

National Gallery of Art · Painting

Ace of Clubs and Four of Diamonds

Juan Gris

Date
1915
Medium
oil on board
Dimensions
overall: 30.48 × 16.51 cm (12 × 6 1/2 in.) framed: 42.07 × 26.99 × 4.13 cm (16 9/16 × 10 5/8 × 1 5/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
2014.17.12
Credit line
Gift of Robert and Mercedes Eichholz
Time span
1901 to 1925
Department
CMC
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • non-representational
  • Spanish
  • Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Paintings
  • Cubist
  • Playing card
Provenance

John Quinn [1870-1924], New York;[1] (his estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 28 October 1926, no. 54); Mrs. Fritz Blumer [née Jeanne Bucher, 1872-1946], Paris;[2] her son-in-law, Dr. André Frédéric Cournand [1895-1988], New York. (Georges Seligmann, Inc., New York); purchased 1966 by Robert B. [1911-1983] and Mercedes H. [1917-2013] Eichholz, Washington, D.C., and Santa Barbara; The Mercedes H. Eichholz Trust, Santa Barbara; bequest 2014 to NGA. [1] Provenance information is given on the 1966 Seligmann bill of sale (copy in NGA curatorial files), which is dated 15 January 1966; full payment was received on 15 June 1966. The painting was not included in the January 1926 memorial exhibition of selected works in Quinn's collection, held at the Art Center, New York. [2] Jeanne Bucher was married to Fritz Blumer, a pianist, from 1895 to 1920. She opened Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1925. Her daughter, Sibylle Blumer (d. 1959), was the first wife of Dr. Cournand, who, with two others, was the recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Inscription

lower right: Juan Gris

NGA object ID 163527. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.