"May 1st at the Kursaal" notebook

18 x 24.5 cm (0.6 cm spine). 40 sheets (80 pages).

Before joining the avant-garde through Cubism, Juan Gris devoted himself for several years mainly to illustration in the press and magazines. One of his themes par excellence was prostitution, which was very popular with the public of the time, as in the case of the work reproduced on the cover of this notebook, May 1st at the Kursaal (1907). In it we can see how the characters are constructed with angular, synthetic lines, while the cigarette smoke, resolved with wavy white lines, is once again a modernist device.