Only Juan Gris could make a fruit bowl on a table look so erotic...and by erotic, I mean confusing. Really, really confusing.

Yes, this voluptuous chair before us is actually a depiction of many perspectives of a single subject happening simultaneously—okay, I know, I know: what? It sounds crazy, but that’s cubism. If a mere bowl of fruit and table could be seen from every angle of the room they’re standing in all at once, it might look a little something like Fruit Dish on a Checkered Tablecloth. Which is to say, it might look like an explosion of bricks and a barrage of green olives and maybe somewhere in the middle a Freudian slip or two. Cubism, ladies and gentlemen.

Gris is famous for many contributions to the cubism movement just like Fruit Dish—although the movement’s founding members, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, felt Gris was a little too clingy and his work was a little too colorful. Who knew one could be so picky about shapes? Yet, when it comes to nitpickiness, Gris had them all beat; he was obsessed with mathematical precision (he studied engineering in college) and worked rigorously to portray finely calculated lines, shapes, angles, and patterns in his work.

Other artists of the movement believed strongly in depicting total abstraction in their work—that is to say, they made paintings that represented a completely inhuman perspective (all shapes, no Freud). Gris, always the rebel, preferred to keep things a little more tense, always holding some convention of still life within the blur of his work’s geometric madness. Is it fruit? Is it bullsh*t? Gris, you clever fiend, we can never be sure.