ENTIRE LIGHT
Esteban Vicente and his contemporaries [1918-1936]

April 9 – July 13, 2003

The current exhibition, whose title is derived from Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “lyrical caricature” of Francisco Bores, attempts to trace the trajectory of “Esteban Vicente before Esteban Vicente,” in other words, Esteban Vicente before beginning his “second life” in America in 1936. It is divided into four distinct parts and, as its subtitle “Esteban Vicente and His Contemporaries” indicates, it deals with the period from 1918 to 1936, one of the most densely populated and interesting periods in modern Spanish art.

The first block is centered on the Madrid of the Ultraista movement. It begins in 1918, the year of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s visit to Madrid, and culminates in 1925 with the Exposición de la Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos, the first extensive avant-garde manifestation of the visual arts in Spain. Alongside works done by Esteban Vicente during his years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando are shown paintings by the Uruguayan “vibrationist”, Rafael Barradas, and Francisco Bores, Rafael Botí, Salvador Dalí, Gabriel García Maroto, the Polish artist, Wladyslaw Jahl, the Frenchman, Frédéric Macé, Daniel Vázquez Díaz and Eduardo Vicente, the younger brother of Esteban. The predominant note is ultraista, although other ways of assimilating the Cubist heritage are also present, evident mainly in the lessons of Vázquez Díaz.

The second block speaks to us of Murcia, the region where his art school companion, Juan Bonafé, came from and whose famiily lived in the market garden town of La Alberca. Here Esteban Vicente linked up with an active circle of painters: Pedro Flores, Luis Garay, Ramón Gaya and the errant Englishman, Cristóbal Hall. At the same time, José Ballester, Juan Guerrero Ruiz and Jorge Guillén were publishing the literary review, Verso y Prosa, to which our painter submitted some sketches, all of which contributed to making this small town an active cultural center. Two other names also associated with this nucleus of “clear painting” are Lorenzo Aguirre, a Navarrese artist residing in Alicante and Emilio Varela, who was born in Alicante and was a friend of the writer Gabriel Miró and the composer Oscar Esplá.

The third block is devoted to the Spanish School of Paris and, by extension, to “poetic painting”, a term coined by Bores to denote “fruit-painting,” a type much favored by the journal Cahiers d’Art. Many of the painters represented here passed through a “Picassian” phase-to use a colloquial term of the time-and later drifted towards a peculiar phrase characterized by a harmony between Cubism and lyricism. Included in this section are Manuel Angeles Ortiz, Luis Bayón, Francisco Bores, again, Pancho Cossío, Juan José Luis González Bernal, Ismael González de la Serna, José Moreno Villa, Alfonso de Olivares, Benjamín Palencia, Joaquín Peinado, Gregorio Prieto and Hernando Viñes.

The last block deals with the Barcelona of the Republican years and with Ibiza, the modern island, represented by Angel Ferrant, Emilio Grau Sala and Soledad Martínez.

The exhibition is divided into the following spaces: Madrid, Levante, Paris and Barcelona.

Sponsored by Junta de Castilla y León, Caja Segovia and SECC.