Calle del Pintor Juan Gris

The painter’s name was José Victoriano González-Pérez, and he was born in Madrid in 1887. Around 1905 he took the name Juan Gris, the signature by which he would enter the history of twentieth-century art. He earned a living with drawings for illustrated magazines before leaving for Paris in 1906. There he settled in the Bateau-Lavoir, the ramshackle Montmartre building where Picasso lived, and moved from drawing to painting and from painting to Cubism, of which he was one of the most methodical interpreters. He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, in 1927, at the age of forty. Calle del Pintor Juan Gris is a short street in Castillejos, barely one hundred and thirty meters. The neighborhood gathered painters' names here, and this stretch was left with that of a Madrid man who developed his work in Paris.