Juan Gris is recognized along with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger as one of the four major figures in Cubism, the avant-garde 20th-century art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture. Gris was born in 1887 in Madrid, where he later studied engineering from 1902 to 1904. Gradually, he started to shift his attention to drawing and began creating illustrations for local periodicals. In 1906, Gris moved to Paris, to the Montmartre neighborhood, where he met Pablo Picasso, who introduced him to the leading avant-garde artists, poets, and critics of the time: Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy. Juan Gris worked as a graphic artist, creating drawings for political and satirical magazines.

Influenced by his environment, he started to pursue painting seriously in 1911. He made his artistic debut in the 1912 Salon of Independent Artists with The Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912), a painting that is considered one of the finest examples of Cubist portraiture.

In 1913, under the influence of Picasso and Braque, Gris began to experiment with collage and, more specifically, papier collé (cut and pasted paper). Through these artistic experiments, Gris contributed to the development of Synthetic Cubism – a later phase of Cubism that emphasized the flat quality of the image. From 1916 onward, he turned his attention to painting figures, creating more distilled compositions with more simplified geometric structures, like Portrait of Madame Josette Gris (1916) and Seated Woman (1917). 

Some of his major exhibitions include the 1923 shows at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin and the 1925 show at the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf. Juan Gris died from kidney failure on May 11, 1927, at his home in Boulogne-sur-Seine. He was only 40 years old. Source: WikiArt.