Pablo Gargallo

PABLO GARGALLO CATALÁN (Maella, Zaragoza, 1881 - Reus, Tarragona, 1934).
"Mother of the artist".
Mixed media on paper.
Entitled "My mother" in the lower margin.
Work referenced in the Catalogue Raisonné "PABLO GARGALLO. Drawings". Volume II, pg. 796, ref. 245.
With label of Lp Art. Paris, where the name of the owner (Anguera-Gargallo family) appears.
Measurements: 46 x 31 cm; 72 x 52 cm (frame).

This is a very special work, as there is hardly any portrait of Pablo Gargallo to his mother. It is, in addition, a drawing that is inserted with coherence in the whole of his artistic trajectory. The gaunt, angular face, with a visible bone structure, refers directly to the way Gargallo sculpted faces: without embellishments, seeking the physical and spiritual truth of the model. The attention to the bony, long-fingered hands is also significant: in Gargallo's sculpture, the hands often have emotional and gestural prominence. Gargallo avoided the superfluous, both in volume and stroke, and that austerity is powerfully conveyed here. The black scarf that frames the face acts almost as a shadow modeling. The use of waxes and ink, the somber colors, the palette reduced to earthy and black tones, is in keeping with the intimate and austere dimension of the human condition, so that in addition to being a maternal portrait, it becomes an effigy of silent dignity.

Throughout his life, Gargallo developed in parallel two apparently opposing styles: one of classical roots, related first to modernism and later to noucentisme, and the other avant-garde, which experiments with the disintegration of space. Our drawing is clearly inserted in the first group, although both lines of work are ultimately complementary. Both have in common the theme of the human figure, which he endows with enormous dignity.

Pablo Gargallo is considered the precursor of iron sculpture, and learned the technique of forging with his father, who owned a blacksmith shop. In 1888 his family emigrated to Barcelona for economic reasons and there he began his artistic training, in the workshop of the sculptor Eusebio Arnau and in the School of La Lonja, with Venancio Vallmitjana as his main teacher. At the height of Modernism in Barcelona, Gargallo frequented the gatherings of "Els quatre Gats", establishing relationships with artists such as Nonell and Picasso. That is why his first works are influenced by Modernism, as is the case of the decoration of Barcelona buildings that he made in collaboration with the architect Domènech i Montaner, such as the Hospital de la Santa Cruz y San Pablo or the Palau de la Música. In 1903 Gargallo obtained a scholarship that allowed him to travel to Paris to complete his studies. His stay in the French capital was brief, but from then until 1923, when he settled permanently in Paris, his trips there would be frequent. In this city he found the aesthetic formulations of cubism, assimilated its expressive systems and sought the schematism and essentiality of figures and objects, trying to find the authentic three-dimensional expression of the cubist postulates. During these years he began to use metallic materials such as sheet metal, copper and iron. Around 1911-12 he made his first masks, pieces of great simplification made with cut sheet metal, linked to the cubist aesthetic. Using sheet metal, Gargallo began to suggest volumes and exalt the voids through the penetration of light into the interiors. In 1920 he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Escuela Técnica de Oficios Artísticos de la Mancomunidad de Cataluña, a post from which he was removed in 1923 for political reasons. It was then that Gargallo settled permanently in Paris with his wife and daughter. From this moment on his style acquires a very personal dimension, derived from his interpretation of cubism, based on the search for a formal synthesis of the figure in geometric planes always fluid, replacing conventional materials with wrought iron sheets, and introducing a new sculptural language by introducing the void as volume and giving his figures a great expressive dramatism. Pablo Gargallo is currently represented in the museum that bears his name in Zaragoza, the MoMA in New York, MACBA in Barcelona, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid, among many others.