He had explored the idea of the pun for its potential to exploit misunderstandings between words that are alike but which have different meanings. Not for the first time, Picasso included the painted letters 'JOU', here in the guise of the title of a newspaper. The image proved iconoclastic in that it confused the viewers' idea of where the line between popular culture and fine art stood. As Poggi noted, 'The rope, in marking the edge of the collage as a picture of a café table, also makes the oval canvas itself synonymous with that table, thus conflating the literal object with the table that it represents'. This oval canvas, framed by a piece of common rope, posits itself as a table, while a painted and multi-faceted tableau of items - a knife, a pipe, a slice of citrus - are arranged on a piece of oilcloth, printed with a chair caning pattern. Gris, who believed that there was more to art than just replicating scenes from the bland material world, also drew on a more expressive palette to produce his works. His works allowed for the methods of papier collé to develop more compositional depth and optical distortion than his esteemed colleagues. Of the three men, it was Gris who produced Synthetic works that retained closest ties to what one might call 'anti-pictorialism' (or abstraction).It was, certainly for Picasso, a politicized art in that its 'makeshift' quality presented an affront to the time-honoured values of the art establishment. Synthetic Cubism was a self-conscious attempt to 'deintellectualize' fine art by appropriating objects and signs from the realms of commodity culture.The viewer was then invited to think about how these elements synthesised as a whole. The technique of creating new structures out of the already familiar asked the viewer to consider, not just the content of the image, but also the texture, the color, and the materials of the work.

With papier collé, Synthetic Cubism took scraps from the material world and pasted them into the constructed world of painting and drawing.

Indeed, the prefix 'synthetic' referred to the idea that by juxtaposing fragments from the real world with the painterly the artist creates a synthesis something completely new out of a marriage of seemingly incompatible elements.

This is not to imply, however, that Synthetic Cubism lacked conceptual rigor. The revolutionary practice of presenting mundane materials as fine art introduced a more relaxed and more playful aesthetic option for the artists involved.Synthetic Cubism is thought to have peaked by 1914 when World War One took many French artists (including Braque) away from their studios to fight in the conflict. To achieve its ends, Synthetic Cubism brought together - or 'synthesized' - a variety of mixed media through collage and its signature papier collé technique. Synthetic Cubism embraced a broader palette, simpler geometric planes, and more representable subject matter too.

Through experiments in collage using newspaper print and printed patterns, the Synthetic Cubists moved away from the multi-perspective (Analytic) approach in favor of 'flattened out' images that all-but dispensed with their earlier allusions to three-dimensional space. Most scholars are agreed that the former covers a two-year period that ended around 1912 and by which time it had evolved into what became known as Synthetic Cubism. In an attempt to account for the most important advances in avant-garde art made by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris, historians have tended to split the Cubist movement into two key phases: Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism.

Picasso synthetic cubism