Google Doodle's Juan Gris and Cubism

I was drawn to the Google Doodle on March 23rd celebrating the 125th anniversary of the birth of Cubist painter Juan Gris. He was the third cubist painter and a student of Picasso. The Google logo was turned into a cubist doodle in the style of Juan Gris. Quite fun stuff!

Here's the doodle.

I was first introduced to cubism by a girlfriend, Mary Griffin, while attending Loyola University in Chicago. She was a fine cubist painter in her own right. Often wonder what happens to folks one loses contact with over the years. I believe she is, or was, a docent at the Chicago Art Institute. Wouldn't surprise me as she loved visiting the institute as well as she loved art! Cubism, an artistic style where recognizable objects are fragmented to show all sides of an object at the same time, was first "discovered" by Pablo Picasso (http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Picasso-Pablo.html).

Anyway, I found several articles about the Google Juan Gris doodle that was published in several newspapers. This one from the Washington Post has a couple of fine little videos attached to it and you can see it by clicking HERE.

The Huffington Post stated, "The UK's Metro reported that Gris' portrait of the famous Pablo Picasso "is widely thought to be the first piece of cubist art ever that wasn't painted by Picasso or Frenchman Georges Braque." "

Here's a portrait of Juan Gris painted by Modigliani I found on Wikipedia's page about Gris.

Later in the day on local news, I happened to hear a short bit about Picasso where they stated he said something like, "As a child I was taught to paint like an adult. As an adult I learned to paint like a child." I thought that was a very astute, accurate summation by Picasso about his art. Even though cubism itself embodies, perhaps, a more adult-like child's view and practice of painting, perhaps, cubists are/were just more in touch with their "inner child?"