Today’s work of art is by a Spanish painter, who painted as Juan Gris, though he real name was more of a mouthful: José Victoriano González-Pérez. Gris was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso and was also one of artists to found Cubism, though people like Picasso and Georges Braque are more well-known. Though born in Madrid, Gris spent worked most of his life in France, and was a friend of Henri Matisse, Braque and others. Most Cubists painted using a monochromatic palette, but Gris — possibly because of his friendship with Matisse — went in a slightly different direction, preferring bold, varied colors. His style of Cubism became known as synthetic cubism. His use of color is evident in today’s painting, Glass of Beer and Playing Cards, painted in 1913. The painting is in Ohio, at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Christine Poggi had this to say about the painting in her book, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage:

Gris organized Glass of Beer and Playing Cards according to a dominating pattern of vertical strips. … A coherently silhouetted beer mug might be established by shifting the vertical band that constitutes the right side of the mug upward so that the white outline becomes contiguous with the outline of the fully modeled form of the mug to its left. But this realignment would in turn disalign the continuity between the blue curvature on the orange wallpaper and the edge of the sand to the right, both forms constituting a view from above of the beer’s foam. Changes or transformations in the appearance of an object seem to occur in a number of directions: they follow the alternating rhythm of vertical bands but also the contrapuntal system of horizontal bands. Occasionally there is also a sense of transformations occurring in depth, as if Gris had peeled away the surface of certain vertical bands to reveal an alternate mode of representation or point of view beneath.

There is a little more information about Juan Gris at Wikipedia and more biographical stuff at the Art Archive. You can see over 100 of his works at the Athenaeum and also there are many links at ArtCyclopedia.