The MACA - Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante presents works by Pablo Picasso, Luis Fernández and Julio González, deposited at the MACA by Florencio Martín, heir of Eusebio Sempere, which can be enjoyed from July 25, 2017.
These are significant works that demonstrate the importance of the collections that the Alicante artist gathered with the intention of expanding the 20th Century Art Collection, but which unfortunately never reached this museum. Now, with this deposit, it is an unparalleled opportunity to fulfill his intention.
These pieces accompany in the space the splendid works of Julio González, Juan Gris and Pablo Gargallo that the 20th Century Art Collection possesses. Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Mougins (France), 1973)
One of the greatest artists of the 20th century, who participated in numerous artistic movements.
Picasso frequently resorts to El Greco, one of his favorite painters, in a return to his Spanish roots. Picasso admired "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz" by El Greco, a painting to which he dedicated a book that he composed between 1957 and 1959. A monumental book that Picasso illustrates with his own poetry based on his life and his Andalusia.
This is a book illustrated by Pablo Picasso, one of the most important within his production. The publication consists of a prologue and text by Rafael Alberti and 12 etchings and one engraving. The text of the volume is dated 1939, handwritten by Picasso himself in color lithography and is accompanied by etchings and dry point. The book demonstrates the knowledge Picasso had of the techniques of André Breton's group and proof of this is the automatic writing that is published in facsimile accompanying the series of engravings, a surrealist experience of the Count of Orgaz where eroticism and pornography are recurring themes: exotic scenes, circus scenes or allegorical scenes imbued with eroticism.
"Included in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is this engraving that dates from 1939, and which, in accordance with the technique, but also with Picasso's feeling of that time, shows a rigidity and linear intensity very characteristic. The idea of including this print in the book came to Picasso from the text that he engraved in harmony with letter and drawing. It is a brief fragment, but its stylistic characteristics already foreshadow those that distinguish the unbridled paragraphs of the Burial, with its disdain for logic and even for spelling, if it is not a taste for openly violating it. Therefore, this engraving that unites text and drawing, and which emerged as pure expression of a lyrical moment, indeterminate perhaps, comes to enrich the copies of the ninth volume of La Cometa Editions."
Explanatory text about the engraving included in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, edited and printed by Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.A. of Barcelona in 1969. Luis Fernández (Oviedo, 1900-Paris, 1973)
He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He moved to Paris where he came into contact with avant-garde artistic movements. There he met artists such as Lipchitzi, Braque, Ozenfant, among others and the Spanish artists Joaquín Peinado, Francisco Bores, Julio González and Picasso. These artists gave him the opportunity to know and work with the different artistic isms of the avant-gardes: cubism, purism, neoplasticism followed later by surrealism. His work evolved progressively toward a more personal and hermetic world.
This preparatory drawing confirms the architectural and geometric features that the artist has studied carefully, examining the different relationships between the parts, using geometric resources to create figures of strong intensity.
Like the original, the image is based on the number three: three necks, three chins, three noses, ... three heads, in this way the central one partially uses the elements of the two lateral ones. Three heads constituted rhythmically, architecturally: the ciliary arches appear supported by the columns that are the nose, and these rest on the lips of the mouth, are adorned with the arches of the nasal lobes and stand out with the spheres of the three chins. The rhythm is established in the verticality of all these motifs but also in the horizontal superposition of arches, circles and straight lines.
Julio González (Barcelona, 1876 – Arcueil (France), 1942)
Julio González is considered one of the great names in modern sculpture. He trained as a craftsman in artistic metalwork that his father had in Barcelona. In Paris, the city to which he moved with his family, he came into contact with Spanish artists such as Gargallo, Sabartés, Hugué and Picasso. But it was the contact with Picasso, with whom he collaborated between 1928 and 1932, that allowed him to recognize the possibilities that iron had for sculpture. His work with iron, with which he created his own language, has been valued as one of the most valuable contributions of the avant-gardes of the thirties, although he only dedicated a decade of his life to creation with this metal.
In his sculptures his antecedents are found in the works of Pablo Gargallo, space is part of the work itself, initiating a path that many other sculptors later followed such as David Smith or Eduardo Chillida. González himself applied the term "drawing in space" to a part of his work, the one he created with iron bars or rods.
Filiform or linear sculptures –what he himself called drawing in space–, volumetric heads or biomorphic figures are the result of work of great technical and conceptual rigor that would open the doors to recognition as one of the great sculptors of the 20th century.
Mask is a watercolor made by Julio González in 1940 that belongs to a series of studies for masks of geometric character. The artist takes his own portrait as a model to work and modify the proportions and features of his face, taking them to an abstract reorganization.
This is a silkscreen print of the watercolor made by González, printed by Eusebio Sempere and Abel Martin for the exhibition that took place at the Ateneo of Madrid in 1960 about Julio González.
