Salvador DalíMariano Fortuny
Juan Gris
Antonio López
César Manrique
Joan Miró
Pablo Picasso
Antonio Saura
Eusebio Sempere
Antoni Tápies
"Portrait of Josette Gris" by Juan Gris
Salvador Dalí
Mariano Fortuny
Juan Gris
Antonio López
César Manrique
Joan Miró
Pablo Picasso
Antonio Saura
Eusebio Sempere
Antoni Tápies
"Portrait of Josette Gris" by Juan Gris
Salvador Felipe Jacinto
Dalí y Domenech
was born in Figueres,
Catalonia, in 1904. Dalí,
as he is known in the artistic world, was educated at the School of Fine Arts in
Madrid. As an art student in Barcelona and Madrid he demonstrated an incredible
ability to learn different styles of painting. His unique, and very
controversial, style matured by the late 1920s, when he espoused and became the
leader of Surrealism.
In 1925 he met the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia
Lorca
in Cadaques,
Catalonia; and in 1926 he met Pablo Picasso, two giants of the Spanish culture.
After reading the works of Sigmund Freud on the erotic significance of
subconscious imagery, his paintings began to depict images of dreams and
everyday objects juxtaposed and in the most unusual forms, in what seemed to be
an effort to establish a link between our subconscious over reason. Most of
these bizarre images are portrayed within sunlit landscapes reminiscent of his
native Catalonia. To create these works
Dalí
immersed himself in hallucinatory states using a process he called “paranoiac
critical”. A good example from this period is his famous painting “The
Persistence of Memory” (1931).
He left Spain during the Civil War and the turbulent years that followed. He
lived in Italy from 1937 to 1938; and in France in 1939 before moving to the
United States. Dalí and Gala lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948. In
addition to painting he designed and produced surrealist films, illustrated
books, did advertising, handcrafted jewelry, and created theatrical sets and
costumes. In 1946 he made several drawings for Walt Disney and Alfred
Hitchcock. Some of his best known books are “The Secret Life of Salvador
Dalí”
(1942), and “Diary of a Genius” (1965). His most famous, albeit controversial,
films were “Un Chien Andalou”
(1928), and “The Golden Age” (1930), which were produced in collaboration with
Luis Buñuel.
From 1950 to 1970 his works focused mostly on religious themes, and a more
classical style, although he didn’t stop exploring his erotic subjects
entirely. Some of his best paintings during this period include “Crucifixion”
(1954), and The Sacrament of the Last Supper”. Most of his paintings are
characterized by a meticulous draftsmanship, excellent detail, and brilliant
colors heightened by transparent glazes. His precise style seems to enhance the
nightmare effect of his paintings.
Some of his most important exhibitions were the first one he had in New York
City in 1933, one in London in 1934, and one in Tokyo in 1964, among others.
His constant desire to experiment led to some works in 3D in 1971, which had
limited acceptance. In spite of his eccentricities he received many honors and
was recognized by very important people including the Pope in 1958, and King
Juan Carlos who visited the Dalí
museum in
Figueres
in 1978. Gala died in 1982, and the artist stopped painting the following
year. Salvador Dalí
died in
Figueres,
Spain, in 1989. The Salvador Dali Museum, in St. Petersburg, Florida, is
devoted entirely to his works.
Mariano Fortuny i Marsal was born in Reus, Catalonia, in 1838. Fortuny attended the school of Simon Fort where he received a general education, and where he took elementary art lessons. His father, Mariano, was a carpenter; his mother, Teresa, was a homemaker devoted to her four children. She died during an epidemic of cholera that desolated Catalonia in the late 1840s, when Mariano was only eleven years old. The rest of the family moved to Barcelona, where Mariano lived with his grandfather, a craftsman known as “Marianet de les Figures”. His grandfather was so impressed with his drawings that he took Mariano to the studio of Domingo Soberano, who taught him oil painting and aquarelles. He learned the art of doing miniatures with Antonio Bassa, a silversmith.
Domingo Tallarn, a sculptor, got him a grant for his first formal education at the School of Fine Arts in La Lonja, Barcelona. His teachers were Pablo Mila i Fontanals, Luis Rigalt, and Claudio Lorenzale. Fortuny spent most of his time in Lorenzale’s studio where he perfected his style while working non stop on xylography, lithographs, drawing, and doing illustrations for novels. He worked so hard that he became gravely ill and had to be taken to Berga by his grandfather to recuperate. His works during this period fall in the categories of historical, religious, and mythological. His painting “Ramón Berenguer III at the Castle of Foix” earned him a scholarship from the city of Barcelona to complete his studies in Rome.
He arrived in Rome in 1858 where he was very disillusioned at first, until he met two fellow artists and countrymen, Eduardo Rosales and Dióscoro de la Puebla. Fortuny and his friends frequented museums and churches where they admired the works of Raphael and other Italian masters; as well as Velázquez’ portrait of Pope “Inocencio X”. He became particularly interested in open air painting and aquarelles; and made several paintings for the City of Barcelona as a form of repayment for his scholarship, and sold others to local customers to earn a living.
During the War between Spain and Morocco in 1859 Fortuny was commissioned by the City of Barcelona to paint battle scenes. One of the main protagonists of that war was General Juan Prim, who was born in Reus, Fortuny’s birthplace. The young artist arrived in time to witness the battle of Wad-Ras, and was able to paint a series of large canvasses of great historical value. After the war he spent some time in Madrid, where he visited the Prado and admired the works of Velázquez, Ribera and Goya; and where he met Federico Madrazo and his daughter Cecilia, his future wife. He visited the church of San Ginés several times while preparing for the wedding; these visits gave him the inspiration for one of his greatest masterpieces, “The Vicary” (1867). His war paintings were such a resounding success that the City of Barcelona decided to give him a grant to travel throughout Europe to study the works of famous painters, with special focus on war scenes.
Fortuny visited Paris, Rome, Madrid and, at one point, he traveled back to Morocco for inspiration. He continued to work on miniatures, aquarelles, and on a large canvass for the City of Barcelona called “The Battle of Tetuan”. His miniatures, with their beautiful colors, light, and appealing motifs, were sought out by art dealers throughout Europe and made him wealthy.
After a brief stay in Granada, Mariano and Cecilia moved to Rome where he opened a studio. He worked incessantly until he contracted malaria in 1869. The couple and their daughter Maria Luisa moved to Paris where he opened a studio that became a popular gathering place for artists, intellectuals, and aristocrats. An exposition of his works at the Goupil Gallery was immensely successful. The couple returned to Spain in 1870 and established themselves in Granada, where Mariano, their second child, was born in 1871. Fortuny, pressed by his art dealers to produce quick results for a big profit, fell into a deep depression. It was during this difficult time that he painted “Corral” and “Paisaje”, perhaps in an effort to free himself for external pressures and do what he liked best. Some of his paintings in the early 1870s reached the incredible sum of 90,000 francs, a record for that era.
His friend, Baron Charles Davillier, arranged a trip to London in an effort to help Fortuny overcome his psychological and physical problems. From England he traveled to Italy where he did an impressionist painting called “Desnudo en la Playa”. In 1874 the family moved to Rome where he had a fatal bout with malaria, complicated by gastric problems caused by his habit to lick his brushes. Mariano Fortuny I Marsal died in Rome in 1874, at the age of 36.
This cosmopolitan artist enjoyed international fame and reached the pinnacle of his career during his short life. Fortuny specialized in small formats but painted some very famous and beautiful large canvasses as well. His miniatures are often portraits of children or landscapes of exquisite beauty and meticulous detail. His successes earned him fame and fortune that allowed him to own homes in various cities and enjoy a comfortable life.
José Victoriano González, better known as Juan Gris, was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1887. In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he was Picasso a friend and neighbor of Picasso, another Spanish emigré. After studying cubism for a few years he exhibited his first work of this genre in 1912, his Homage to Picasso, which consolidated his reputation as a first class artist. Gris worked closely with Picasso and Braque until the outbreak of WWI, in what was then an incipient art form that attempted to depict nature, life and objects in a new and revolutionary way.
In the 1920s, Gris designed costumes and scenery for Serge Diaguilev’s Ballets Russes; and produced some of the boldest and most mature statements of cubism. His landscapes, such as the Mountain “Le Canigou” compress interiors and exteriors into synthetic cubist compositions. His still-life works exhibit a unique treatment of planes, interlaced with lines that join with other inanimate objects. This technique can be best appreciated in his famous “Guitar and Violin” in which the cubist forms of the guitar and the violin unify these instruments harmoniously with the other elements of the composition.
In The Bottle of Banyuls, Gris painted the bottle by juxtaposing partly overlapping, contradictory elements such as an opaque, straight-edged shape that lies beneath and slightly to the left of a transparent, curvilinear shape. Another interesting characteristic of Gris’ works involves his use of a type of paper to achieve the transparency of glass. His collages have a sense of ambiguity in the significance of his pictorial forms and materials. At times they appear to be in an arbitrary formal opposition; while at times they seem motivated by the inherent properties of the materials used.
Other popular works include "Verres, journal et bouteille de vin" (1923), "Arlequin" (1918), "Guitare et compotier" (1926-1927), "La fenêtre aux collines" (1293), "Le paquet de tabac" (1923) y "Le grappe de raisins" (1925). Gris died in 1927, when he was only 40 years old.
Antonio
López
Garcia was born in Tomelloso,
Ciudad Real, in 1936. His parents were modest farmers, but were able to give
Antonio and his three siblings a comfortable childhood. His first teacher and
mentor was his uncle, Antonio López
Torres, a landscape painter. He entered the School of Fine Arts in Madrid in
1950, when he was only thirteen years old. His early exposure to modern
painting was tenuous at best, considering the lack of books on this subject in
postwar Spain. The illustrations that anxious students could find in art books
from Argentina and other countries were studied eagerly by these young artists
who, against all odds, became familiar with the works of Pablo Picasso and other
avant garde
painters.
He graduated in 1955 with outstanding grades; and won a scholarship to study art
in Italy, where he was somewhat disillusioned with their painting, preferring
the works of artists such as Velázquez and Vermeer whose works he could study at
the Prado
Museum. When he returned to Madrid he worked as an Arts professor at the Royal
Academy of San Fernando where he taught coloring; and became a member in 1993.
Antonio married Maria Moreno, a painter he met during his student years in
Madrid.
His “hyper realist” style is defined by the apparent fragility and decay of his
subjects. Through his work, Antonio tries to capture the reality that surrounds
us, which he portrays by painting everyday things with photographic detail. His
emphasis on detail can be appreciated in “Cuarto
de Baño” (Bathroom), “Madrid
desde las
Torres Blancas”
(Madrid from the White Towers), or the “Gran
Via” where the buildings and streets are so
real they look like a photograph. He has also made numerous paintings of
relatives, friends, and common objects representative of our everyday life and
nature.
His works after graduating from the academy show the influence of Cézanne and
some cubist tendencies, which can be appreciated in “Mujeres
mirando los aviones” (Women looking at planes
– 1954); he also experimented with surrealism. His language, however, remain
tied to the tactile classicism of his earliest works through which he expressed
the world around us.
In 1968 he held his first international exhibition at the
Staempfli
Gallery in New York where he showed a wonderful collection of his works based on
portraits of his family, simple objects, images of a garden, and desolate
spaces. That was followed by exhibits in Paris, Turin, Brussels, London and
additional ones in New York. He has spent his professional life as a lonely
figure in an artistic world dominated by abstraction,
informalism,
and other modern tendencies. He is considered the father of the Madrid “hyper
realist” school; where his style has influenced many young artists, such as
Toral
and Villaseñor.
César Manrique Cabrera was born in 1919 in Arrecife, Lanzarote, one of the islands in the Canary Islands archipelago. His parents were Gumersindo Manrique and Francisca Cabrera. His father owned a grocery store, his grandfather was a lawyer. Some of his earliest artistic inspiration came from the fantastic view that could be seen from his parent’s house in Caleta de Famara, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and accessible to a beautiful beach. The memories of his days in this house remained with him throughout his life. Manrique fought in the Civil War on Franco’s side, and although he never talked about what he saw his feelings about this experience are clear; when he returned to Lanzarote he took his uniform off, stepped on it, sprayed gasoline on it and set it on fire.
After his military discharge he entered the University of La Laguna in Tenerife where he studied architecture for two years, until he decided to devote his life to art. César studied painting at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid on a scholarship. His first exhibition as a professional was in Arrecife in 1942. Manrique became one of the pioneers of abstract art in Spain. He was a co-founder of the Fernando Fé Gallery in Madrid, the first devoted to non-figurative art in Spain. In 1954 he held his first large exhibition along with his friends Manuel Manpaso and Luis Feitó who, like him, were abstract painters with similar ideologies. His role models were Picasso and Matisse.
In 1964 his cousin, Manuel Manrique, a psychoanalyst in New York City, suggested he spend time in the United States. During his two-year stay in the U.S. he met Andy Warhol, Waldo Diaz Balart, a Cuban painter, and several other contemporary artists. With his cousin’s help he was able to get a grant from the Nelson Rockefeller Foundation that allowed him to open his own studio and produce a large number of paintings; most of which were exhibited and sold at the Catherine Viviano Art Gallery in New York.
His financial success in the United States was tempered by the nostalgia he felt at being apart from his friends and family, and away from his beloved homeland. He was also disappointed with the American lifestyle, as can be deduced from the following edited letter to his friend Pepe Dámaso in which he characterized his life in New York as follows: “…now more than ever I have a nostalgic need for the true meaning of things, for the purity of my people, for the arid landscape of my homeland, and for my friends. My conclusion is that Man in New York is like a rat; we were simply not created for the artificiality of this place. It is imperative that I return to my country, to feel it, and smell it. That’s how I feel”.
When he returned to Lanzarote in 1968 he said “When I returned from New York, I came with the intention of turning my native island into one of the most beautiful places on Earth, taking advantage of the endless possibilities that Lanzarote has to offer”. It is difficult to imagine Lanzarote without its favorite son, César Manrique. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, ecologist, conservationist, planner of urban development, and landscape designer but, like he said “Before anything, I consider myself a painter”. He held exhibitions in Austria, Brazil, England, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. One of the most important was at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964.
The mystical attraction of his homeland, where volcanic fire meets the ocean and where life is constantly renewed served as inspiration for his work. At one point he said that “My new concept is the combination of the study of nature with art, where painting, sculpting, drawing, architecture, design, texture, and color come together”. Manrique was considered puritanical by some of his countrymen because of his high moral standards, refusal to drink or smoke, and his secluded lifestyle. He died in a car accident in 1992, near his birthplace. He is buried in a graveyard on the edge of Haria with a palm tree at his head and a cactus at his feet.
His love for his homeland is reflected in his best painting, Lanzarote, in which he was able to find the ideal equilibrium between the volcanic landscape of the island and the art of interpreting it. The César Manrique Foundation in Lanzarote offers a large collection of his paintings, as well as many pieces of his private collection which include works by Picasso, Miró, Chillida, and others.
Joan Miró Ferra was born in Montroig, near Barcelona, in 1893. His father was a goldsmith and watchmaker. Miró began taking drawing classes when he was seven years old, but pressed by his parents who wanted him to have a “decent profession” he took business classes and became a bookkeeper. Disillusioned with his business profession he studied painting in La Escuela de la Lonja, in Barcelona, from 1907 to 1910 with landscapist Modesto Urgell Inglada, and applied arts with Professor José Pasco Merisa. From 1912 to 1915 he studied at the private academy of Francisco Galí Fabra.
In 1918, Miró and a group of like-minded young artists founded the “Agrupacio Courbet”, to oppose the traditional Spanish art forms. During this period, known as his poetic realism phase, he painted several landscapes in Montroig, where he used to spend the summer with his parents. Some of his best known works are “The Vegetable Garden with Donkey”, and “The Wagon Tracks”. Many of his works before 1920 seem to be influenced by Cézanne, with objects and forms close to each other, painted in broken colors and striped patterns to form a decorative ornament. This early technique focused on broken forms of cubism, and the flat two-dimensional Catalan folk art and Romanesque frescoes of his native Spain. His first show was at the Dalmau Gallery in 1918; when he was 24 years old.
Miró moved to Paris in 1920 where he met several surrealist and abstract painters including Pablo Picasso, André Masson and Max Ernst. Their influence helped him develop a very unique and personal style. He often used fantasy and the irrational to create his whimsical and humorous works, which almost seem visual analogues of surrealist poetry. The forms on his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds, painted in bright colors, particularly blue, yellow, red, green and black. His best known painting during his period of “poetic realism” was “The Farm”. American author Ernest Hemingway bought this painting because “he saw impressions of the Catalan landscape and mentality reflected in it”.
Shortly after meeting Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and other participants of the Surrealistic group in 1924 he made several paintings in this style. His surrealist phase reached its climax with a small painting called “Harlequin’s Carnival” (1925). In the late 1920s and 1930s he focused on abstract works. His most important works were “Dog Barking at the Moon” (1926), “Painting” (1933), “Composition” (1933), and “Still Life with a Shoe” in which he used common inanimate objects to irradiate an unreal light to make them look like an apocalyptic scene. Like so many other Spanish artists and intellectuals, Miró went into voluntary exile in France at the outbreak of the Spanish civil way. He stayed in France until 1940, when he chose to return to Spain because of WWII.
Miró excelled in several other forms of art including etchings, lithographs, watercolors, pastels, collages, mosaics, illustrated over 300 books, and painted on copper and masonry. His ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun, 1957-59) for which he was awarded the Guggenheim International Award, handed to him by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959.
Some of his most famous ceramic murals include one in the dining room in Harvard Harkness Center (1960-61); building of the Ecole Supérieure de Sciences Economiques in St. Gall, Switzerland (1964); the fence of the Foundation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence; one at the airport in Barcelona (1970), and the Glass pavilion for the World Fair in Osaka (1970). In the 1960s and 70s he became interested in sculpture. His models were usually made out of man-made or natural materials; and later cast in bronze. This prolific artist made over 2,000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramic objects, and 5,000 drawings and collages. He had an immense influence on post-war art in Europe and in the United States. The Fundació Joan Miró was opened at the Centre d’Estudis d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona in 1975. His studio in Palma de Majorca has been converted into a museum.
In 1956 he settled in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, where he built a beautiful villa with a studio designed by his architect friend Josep Luis Sert. He died in Majorca in 1983, at the age of 90.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881. His parents were José Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso y Lopez. He had two sisters Dolores (Lola), and Concepción (Conchita). His father taught drawing at the school of Fine Arts and Crafts in Málaga, where the family struggled to make ends meet. The family moved to La Coruña for four years when Don José was offered a better teaching job. Pablo was enrolled in the school of Fine Arts in La Coruña, but his best childhood teacher was his father. In 1895 the family moved to Barcelona where Don José became a professor at the School of Fine Arts in La Lonja. By then Pablo was an accomplished artist, so much so that he completed the one-month qualifying examination for the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona in only one day, at the age of 14. He later took advanced classes at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, where he was regarded as an artistic prodigy.
The following quote from this artist best describes his early abilities and opinion of himself: “Unlike in music, there are no child prodigies in painting. What people regard as premature genius is the genius of childhood. It gradually disappears as they get older. It is possible for such a child to become a real painter one day, perhaps even a great painter; but he would have to start right from the beginning. So far as I am concerned, I did not have that genius. My first drawings could never have been shown at an exhibition of children’s drawings. I lacked the clumsiness of a child, his naiveté. I made academic drawings at the age of seven, the minute precision of which frightened me.” Picasso.
His first large painting as a professional was “The First Communion” (1896) which was displayed in an exhibition in Barcelona. His second painting was “Science and Charity” (1897), which received honorable mention in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid; and the gold medal in a competition in his birthplace, Málaga. With the help of an uncle Pablo was able to enroll at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid where he took advanced courses in art. He visited the Prado Museum almost daily to study the works of all the great masters and, sometimes, copy their works in an effort to learn and imitate their styles. These visits are credited with being an important source of inspiration during the early development of his unique style of painting.
Picasso’s time in Madrid came to an end when he contracted scarlet fever in the summer of 1898. He returned to Barcelona from where he went to the mountain village of Horta de Ebro to recuperate, where he stayed until the spring of 1899. In 1900 he moved back to Barcelona where he used to spend time at a famous cabaret called Els Quatre Gats, a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. He became a good friend of another young painter called Casagemas, and a poet named Sabartés who would later become his secretary and lifelong friend. He also met several “modernist” painters such as Rusiñol and Nonell with whom he had long discussions about painting styles and techniques. Soon thereafter he abandoned the classical style to undertake what would become his trademark.
In late 1900 Picasso and his friend Casagemas left for Paris, where they opened a studio in Montmartre. His first picture in Paris was “Le Moulin de la Galette” (Guggenheim Museum, New York). In February 1901 Casagemas committed suicide in a Parisian café when the girl he loved turned him down. His death shocked Picasso who made several paintings of this episode including a multicolored “Death of Casagemas”, and the “Evocation – The Burial of Casagemas”, which is essentially the same work painted in blue. The influence of El Greco’s “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” can be found in the latter. The effects of this incident can be detected in his paintings during that troublesome time, particularly in the use of blue as the tonality to depict despair, misery, physical weakness, old age, and poverty. The face of his lost friend can be seen in his allegorical “La Vie” (1903), painted in monochrome blue.
His mood and style changed
dramatically in 1905 when he became fascinated with acrobats, clowns and the
circus life during his frequent visits to the Circus Medrano. His style from
this period is known as his “rose period” because of tones he used which were
mostly subtle pinks and grays, mixed often with brighter tones.
Ambroise Vollard,
an art dealer, bought most of Picasso’s “rose” pictures, leaving the artist free
of financial worries. His interest in new forms of art and styles manifested
itself once again when he saw the Iberian sculptures at the
Louvre,
and experience that led to his experimentation with geometrical forms.
In 1907, Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon,"
considered the best watershed picture of the twentieth century, and met Georges
Braque, the other leader of the Cubist movement. By
1912 they seemed to have exhausted all the possibilities of “analytical” cubism,
and they began to experiment with still life made out of cut-and-pasted scraps
of material, with only a few lines added to complete the design. These collages
led to synthetic cubism involving large, schematic patterning, such as those
found in “The Guitar”. The 1920's were
filled with artistic exploration and productivity. His paintings during this
decade included Cubist, Classical and Surreal modes. From 1929 to 1931, he
pioneered wrought iron sculpture with his old friend Julio Gonzalez, and in the
early 1930's, he did a large quantity of graphic illustrations.
In late April of 1937, the world learned the shocking news of the saturation bombing of the town of Guernica, Spain, by Franco’s troops and the Nazi Luftwaffe; Guernica was one of the oldest towns in the Basque country and one of its most important cultural centers. Most of its civilian population was annihilated. Picasso responded to this atrocity with his great anti-war painting, "Guernica." This famous painting was in New York for forty years, in accordance with the artist’s desire that it should not become Spanish property until the end of Fascism in his country. It returned to Spain in 1981. He spent most of WWII in Paris, working on ceramics. From 1947 to 1950, he pursued new methods of lithography.
Picasso had numerous love affairs including one with a married woman named Fernande, and another with Eva Gouel whom he called “Ma Jolie”. In 1918 he married a famous ballet dancer named Olga and settled down for probably the first time in his life. In 1923 Picasso composed “The Pipes of Pan”, which is regarded as the most important painting of his “classicist period”. In 1927 Picasso met seventeen-year old Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became his mistress shortly afterwards. In June 1935 Picasso admitted that the worst time of his life was when his lover became pregnant with his child. He and Olga divorced after a long court battle over common properties. In 1936 he met Dora Maar, a Yugoslavian photographer, who became his constant companion. She was also the model for his “Portrait of Dora”. During WWII he met a young woman painter, Françoise Gillot, his third “official” wife. The couple had two children Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949). Other women in his life include Sylvette David and Jacqueline Rogue.
His enormous success and the adulation of the critics and public put tremendous pressure on Picasso who underwent some serious psychological crises. According to him “Of all these things – hunger, misery, being misunderstood by the public – fame is by far the worst. This is how God chastises the artist. It is sad. It is true.”
Pablo Picasso is probably the best known painter of the twentieth century. During his 75 year artistic career, he produced thousands of works including paintings, sculptures, prints and ceramics using a myriad of materials and different styles. The impact of his work, which many considered controversial, has been more profound than that of any other artist during the past century. In the last years of his life painting became an obsession, and he would date each picture precisely, creating a large number of similar paintings, and crystallizations of individual moments of timeless happiness. Pablo Ruiz Picasso died in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91. He was buried in the ground of his Chateau Vauvenargues.
Antonio Saura was born in Huesca, Spain, in 1930. He lived with his parents in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia during the Civil War, when they, like most other Spaniards, suffered tremendous hardships. Saura contracted tuberculosis in 1943; during his convalescence he taught himself how to paint. He was also a well known art critic, poet, and a person committed to the advancement of culture and one who resisted the oppression and brutality of the Franco era.
His early works were surrealist until he became the main interpreter of the Spanish Tachisme style. In 1953 he went to Paris where he befriended André Breton, and read Antoni Tápies book, Un art autre. Tápies book changed his artistic life forever; he abandoned surrealism except for its message, that is, to portray the worst acts of a human being. Saura returned to Madrid in 1955 and two years later he formed a group of contemporary artists called El Paso, which was committed to the advancement of the avant garde and informalism movements in Spain. He held an exhibition in Barcelona in 1957 called “Otro arte”, where he met Tápies and the other artists that formed the group Dau al Set.
He began to work on large expressive paintings in 1958, using a subtle and rich scale of color hues, and light-dark scale from black to white. His main focus was abstract painting; however, he never abandoned the human figure, although he usually represented it in deformed shapes in what seemed to be an effort to show the monstrous and irrational sides of the human psyche. His portrait series include famous works such as “Imaginary Portraits”, “the Princesses”, and several emulations of Goya’s “black period” paintings and Crucifixions. Interestingly, the monsters in his portraits are not absent of beauty, a paradox that is difficult to achieve.
Saura received an award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, won the Carnegie Prize, and won first prize at the Graphics Biennale in Heidelberg in 1979. His works have been exhibited in museums throughout the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Galerie Stadler in Paris, Van de Loo Gallery in Munich, the Kuntsthalle in Baden Baden and Goteborg, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Maeght Gallery in Barcelona, the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and at the Marlborough Gallery, among others.
Many of his works were destroyed by a fire in his studio in Cuenca in 1974, and another fire in his house in 1979. In 1977 he was expelled from France because of political statements he made in that country, however, the sentence was not carried out because of the public outcry it caused. Saura was a political activist who campaigned against the Apartheid policies of South Africa, and wrote essays about the massacre in Guernica; he also voiced his opposition to plans to clean up and restore Goya’s Meninas.
Antonio Saura died in Cuenca in 1998, a victim of a hematological illness. He was one among a small group of artists that was able to find a way to bring Spanish art to the international scene after the Civil War. His universality did not make Saura forget his roots or his love for his country and its art.
Eusebio Sempere
was born in Onil, Alicante,
in 1923. He was admitted to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Valencia
when he was 17 years old, shortly after the end of the Civil War. He showed an
affinity for modern art since a very early age, at a time when there was little
interest for that art form in Spain.
Sempere
moved to Paris where, like so many other young artists, he endured years of
financial difficulties. Nevertheless, he remained true to his convictions and
continued painting abstract, geometric and realist paintings at a time when
non-formalism was in vogue. His visits to the studios of
avant garde
artists like Arp, Vasarely
and Herbin
had a very positive effect on him.
Sempere
began to work on a series in which the technique of gouache led him to
investigate simple geometric elements, on black backgrounds. His work with
light on plastic art became evident during an exhibit at the
Réalités Nouvelles
studio in 1955.
His work is defined by its linearity and the repetition of geometric subjects,
through which he tries to find vibrant optical effects using color to create the
desired volume and form. Part of the legacy of this prolific painter, sculptor
and graphic artist are his experiments with light, color and movement. He
returned to Spain in 1960 and associated himself with the
Cuenca
art group, as well as with many artists and intellectuals that gave him
encouragement and inspiration.
Sempere has held exhibitions in many European
countries and in America. Sempere
spent some time in New York City in 1969 investigating the feasibility of using
computers to create art.
Sempere
was named Favorite Son of the City of
Alicante;
was made a Doctor Honoris Causa
by the University of Alicante;
and won the Príncipe
de Asturias award for the arts in 1983.
Eusebio Sempere
died in 1985, alter a long illness. His geometric paintings show great
sensibility and lyricism, making his works some of the most interesting in
contemporary Spanish art.
The
city of
Alicante
managed to acquire 70 of his works in 1996, including paintings, drawings,
gouaches, and sculptures.
Antoni Tápies Puig was born in Barcelona in 1923. His parents were Josep Tápies I Mestres, a lawyer, and Maria Puig I Guerra. His childhood was rather privileged because of the position of his father in the high society of Barcelona. He began his art studies in 1934, and became interested in contemporary art through a magazine called “D’Aci I d’alla“. In 1936 he worked with his father at the Generalitat of Catalonia for a few months, during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1940 he was afflicted by a cardiac/pulmonary illness and suffered a psychological crisis. He stayed at the Puig d’Olena sanatorium until 1942. During his convalescence he made copies of Picasso and Van Gogh paintings, and became interested in music and philosophy. He studied Law at the University of Barcelona for three years, until he decided to dedicate his life to art. In 1944 he studied painting at the Valls Academy. In 1945 he began to experiment with various materials, and became interested in Sartre’s philosophy and oriental culture.
During his formative years he
met several intellectuals who, undoubtedly, had a positive effect in his
artistic development including Joan
Miró,
Joan Ponc,
Joan Brossa, Arnau Puig,
and Joan Pratts.
In 1946 he opened his first studio in Barcelona where he exhibited a number of
abstract and expressionist paintings. Some of his drawings were published in
the magazine Destino
in 1947, which gave him national exposure. In 1948,
Tápies
and some of his friends founded a magazine called “Dau
al Set”. By then he was very interested in surrealist art.
In 1949 he held an exhibition called “Exposición
Antologica de Arte Contemporáneo” in
Tarrasa,
and “Un aspecto de la pintura
Catalana” at the
Institut Français
in Barcelona; and showed paintings at the “Salón
de los Once” in the
Biosca
Studio in Madrid. In 1950 Tápies
received a grant from the government of France to study in Paris, where he spent
one year. There he became interested in Marxism and social realism. He visited
Picasso in his studio at the Rue des
Grands Augustins;
and met Christian Zervos
and Jaime Sabartés.
Antoni
returned to Barcelona in late 1951.
By 1952 he began to distance himself from surrealism focusing instead on geometric paintings. He won the Biannual Contest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and opened an exhibition at the Marshall Fields & Company in Chicago. This same year he had the opportunity of meeting Camilo José Cela, Vicente Aleixandre and Luis Rosales. In 1953 he won First Prize at the Galerias Layetanas in Barcelona; and opened an exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City.
1954 was a busy year for him,
he participated in the XXVII Biannual in Venice, Italy; participated in the 64th
Annual Exposition of the Nebraska Art Association; in the Reality and Fantasy of
the Walker Center in Minneapolis; and married Teresa
Barba Fábregas.
The couple has three children:
Antoni, Clara and Miguel.
In the mid 1950s he won the Republic of Colombia award during the III Biannual
of Hispanic American art in Barcelona; participated in the Phases de
l’Art Contemporain
at the Creuze
Gallery; had his first individual exhibition at the
Stadler
Gallery in Paris; participated in the “Recent Abstract Painting” exhibition at
the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester; and received the X International Award
for Painting in Milan, Italy, the UNESCO award, the David Bright Foundation
award, and the Carnegie Institute award in Pittsburgh. He also published “Antoni
Tápies, et
l’oeuvre
complete”.
In the late 1950s and 1960s he had exhibitions at the Stadler Gallery in Paris; and one at the Van de Loo Gallery in Munich with fellow countryman Antonio Saura. Tápies participated in the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at the “Before Picasso, After Miró” exhibit also in New York. Camilo José Cela dedicated a monographic number to him on his magazine “Papeles de Son Armadans”. He continued to give exhibitions in all major cities and galleries throughout this decade; and won the Art Club award in Providence, USA, the Guggenheim Foundation award, the Great Prize from the President of the French Republic, and the Gold Medal during the VI Congress of International Critics.
In 1966 he was arrested and fined when he participated in an unauthorized student assembly at the Capuchin Convent in Sarriá that was advocating the creation of a democratic college syndicate. In 1967 Rolph Wonlin made a film documentary about Tápies for Swedish television. In addition to his famous paintings he has also made sculptures, illustrations for books, collages, lithographs, mosaics, and has painted numerous murals and paintings for the Spanish company, Telefónica.
In 1974 he won the British Arts Council award during the International Drawings Exposition. In 1977 he collaborated with Rafael Alberti on his book, “Retornos”. In 1979 he won the City of Barcelona award; and became an Honorary Member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In 1981 he received the Gold Medal at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid; and was made Doctor Honoris Causa by the Royal College of Art in London. In 1983 he received the Gold Medal from the Generalitat of Catalonia; and the Rembrandt award from the Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg. The French government made him "Officier des Arts et des Lettres". In 1984 he received the United Nations Association Peace Award. In 1985 the French government gave him the Prix National de Peinture award; and he became a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Stockholm.
In 1987 he participated in the
"Le Siècle de Picasso" exhibit at the
Musée d'Art Moderne
of the Village of Paris; and in the "Fifty Years of
Collecting: An Anniversary Selection" of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In
1988 the University of Barcelona made him a Doctor
Honoris Causa;
the French government made him a “Commentateur
de l'ordre des arts et des lettres” and he
became an honorary member of the
Gesellschaft Bildener Künstler
österreichs of Vienna.
His incomparable work and recognitions
continued throughout the 1990s when he received the Principe de Asturias Award,
the Praemium Imperiale
of the Artistic Society of Japan; and became Doctor
Honoris Causa
at the Universities of Glasgow and the Balearic
Islands. He became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London,
and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
His early works were clearly influenced by Klee and Miró, but by 1953 he turned to abstraction and mixed media, which is considered his most original and important contribution to art. He often adds clay and marble dust to his paint, and uses an assortment of material including strings, rags and even waste paper. He achieved international fame by the end of the 1950s. His inclusion of substantial objects in his paintings, including parts of furniture, has made a tremendous impact on modern art worldwide.
His forms often suggest natural rhythms and the spontaneous movement of matter, while some represent death and look for salvation, albeit with some irony. Tápies's technique can be described as modified automatism and somewhat morbid. He often sets up contradictions and absurdities that are quite often charges with suspense. His motifs often characterize time through the objects he uses, which are destined to be consumed by time. His other main theme is the inhumanity of man, which he depicts in the form of torture and various states of human decomposition. Over half a dozen books have been written about Tápies and his art by authors from around the world. He is one of the most celebrated contemporary painters of modern art.
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