Juan Gris was born in Madrid, Spain in 1887. His real name was Jose Victoriano Gonzalez and he was the thirteenth child of a Madrid businessman. He had grown up and gone to engineering school, where he was known for doodling caricatures of his professors and fellow students. After a brief apprenticeship as a comic illustrator in Spain, Gris got to Paris in 1906. He installed himself as Picasso's neighbor in Bateau-Lavoir, a ramshackle cluster of studios in Montmartre.

When he moved to Paris at the age of nineteen, he considered himself strictly a graphic artist, an illustrator who contributed drawings to various periodicals. For the next six years, Gris was an observer rather than a participant in the upheavels that permanently chan...