One of the leading Cubists, Gris always resisted the extreme fragmentation of form seen in the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque. In his still lifes of the 1920s Gris's aspiration towards a pure, "classical" Cubism is revealed in the clarity of his treatment of objects. In 1921 he remarked: "I work with the elements of the intellect, with the imagination. I try to make concrete that which is abstract. I proceed from the general to the particular, by which I mean that I start with an abstraction in order to arrive at a true fact."