The Sunblind
- Artist: Juan Gris
- Date: 1914
- Medium: Gouache, paper, chalk and charcoal on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 921 x 727 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is “The Sunblind” by Juan Gris, painted in 1914 in Collioure, a fishing town on the French‑Spanish border. In this papier‑collé the artist layers gouache, charcoal and chalk on canvas, then glues a slice of a local newspaper—Le Socialiste des Pyrénées‑Orientales—right into the scene. The light cuts through a Venetian blind, casting a delicate shadow of a wine glass onto a small wooden table. Gris was fascinated by how geometry and light can be distilled into simple planes, so he slices the blind into sharp diagonal slats that echo the table’s edges. The newspaper’s masthead, a real fragment from a March 1914 issue, adds a textual layer that ties the work to its place of creation. Gris once wrote, “My art is an art of synthesis…I try to concretise that which is abstract.” Here, the collage’s dense textures and clean lines bring that synthesis to life, marrying abstraction with a tangible still‑life.
See it in person
The Sunblind is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
