If you drink an entire bottle of rum and then try to read the newspaper, chances are you will see something pretty similar to Juan Gris’s Bottle of Rum and Newspaper.

Does your head hurt as much as mine? It looks like somebody partied a little too hard in geometry class, and for once it wasn’t Picasso. I recommend taking some aspirin before we talk about cubism—it’s an art movement all about imposing many perspectives of the same subject at the same time to alter the viewer’s perception of reality. I know, that aspirin can’t kick in fast enough.

Gris was a big part of the movement, and a huge fan of its founding members Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso—though they weren’t as crazy about him and thought he was more of a fanboy who could never really “get” shapes like they did (art cliques, amiright?).

Nevertheless, Bottle of Rum and Newspaper is a fine example of how Gris followed their lead in the paper collage (ahem, papier collé) business of pasting paper shapes together on more paper and thus turning boring old still life into something super trippy and cool. In cubism, the drama and intrigue is less about the objects themselves, and more about their representation—dramatic angles, lighting that pops and blurs, shapes upon shapes upon shapes…it can all get very disorienting. Maybe there’s more in that pipe than just tobacco, hint hint, nudge nudge.

There’s a lot of math involved too, but that wasn’t a requirement of cubism—Gris had studied mathematics and engineering in college and preferred to approach his artwork with the same kind of exacting precision.1 Who would have known he could have made such an awesome geometry book?

Bottles, food, musical instruments, and bodies were frequent subjects of Gris's work. Truth be told, whatever it was, if Gris was involved, things were shaping up to be a good time.