Manolo Hugué

MANOLO HUGUÉ (Barcelona, 1872 - Caldas de Montbui, Barcelona, 1945).
"Bullfighter".
Watercolor on paper.
Attached lithographic reproduction of the work.
Signed with initials in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 28 x 21 cm.

Manolo Hugué renewed the genre costumbrista with bullfighters, maternities, old women and gypsies that transcend the folklorist stamp. In this imposing representation he endows the bullfighter with a powerful posture of movement and tension, since the artist has skillfully captured the moment in which the bull charges the cape.

Manuel Martínez Hugué, Manolo Hugué, trained at the Escuela de la Lonja in Barcelona. In 1900 he moved to Paris, where he lived for ten years. There he worked on the design of jewelry and small sculptures, influenced by the work of his friend, the sculptor and goldsmith Paco Durrio. Between 1910 and 1917, completely dedicated to sculpture, he worked in Ceret, where he gathered a heterogeneous group of artists, among them Juan Gris, Joaquín Sunyer and, again, Picasso. During these years he held exhibitions in Barcelona, Paris and New York. In 1932 he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Jorge in Barcelona. In Hugué's work, the essential is the relationship with nature, taking into account the human figure as an integrated element in it. In his artistic production coexist the Mediterranean tradition, the Greek classicism and archaism, and the art of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the European avant-garde that he assimilated and knew firsthand, specifically Matisse's Fauvism and Cubism. Works by Hugué are kept in the MACBA, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the National Art Museum of Catalonia and the Reina Sofia National Museum and Art Center, among many others.