Eugenio Granell

EUGENIO GRANELL (A Coruña, 1912 - Madrid, 2001).
"Behind the sphinx", 1959.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower margin, titled and dated on the back.
Measurements: 51 x 76 cm; 64 x 88.5 cm (frame).

This composition seems to evoke an underwater world of corals and metamorphic forms of all colors and textures. The title takes us into the allegorical plane. Granell resorts to surrealism and evocations of the tropical landscape (in the fifties he was exiled in the Caribbean and Latin America) to compose organic and suggestive abstractions that hide complex concepts related to the difficult political and personal moment he was living. During his stay in Guatemala, Granell absorbed influences from local cultures, which is reflected in his works through motifs and colors that evoke indigenous art and the exuberance of the landscapes. At the same time, the influence of Max Ernst's mossy landscapes, his enchanted forests and biomorphic forms suggesting a secret life can be appreciated.

Painter, watercolorist, engraver and sculptor, Eugenio Fernández Granell spent his childhood in Santiago de Compostela, a city that will largely mark his plastic work. Initially inclined towards music, in 1928 he moved to Madrid to study violin at the Escuela Superior de Música. In the capital he frequented intellectual circles linked to Marxism, and finally joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista in 1935. At the outbreak of the civil war he joined the Republican army, and also directed "El combatiente rojo", the newspaper of his party. However, after the end of the war he was persecuted both by the new regime and by his communist comrades, because of his Trotskyist condition. He went into exile in France in 1939, and after passing through several concentration camps, he went to South America. He settles in the Dominican Republic, where he enters as first violin in the Symphony Orchestra. However, when Trujillo's dictatorship hardened, Fernández Granell left the country to settle in Guatemala, where he worked as a professor at the School of Plastic Arts. When the Guatemalan revolution broke out in 1950, he had to flee again for fear of Stalinist persecution, and this time he arrived with his family in Puerto Rico, where the painter would occupy the chair of Art History in the Faculty of Humanities. However, in spite of this continuous pilgrimage, Fernández Granell continued with his artistic work, holding exhibitions and publishing books of short stories and poetry. In 1956 he meets Marcel Duchamp, who flatters his plastic and poetic art and reinforces him in his surrealist activity. That same year he moved to New York, where he settled permanently. Professor of Spanish Literature at Brooklyn College in the city, at this stage he earned his doctorate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, with the thesis "Picasso's Guernica. The end of a Spanish era" (1967). Fernández Granell will continue in New York until 1985, when after retiring he returns with his wife to Spain, settling in Madrid. Already widely recognized, he will be awarded outstanding prizes such as the Gold Medal of Fine Arts. Likewise, in 1995, the foundation that bears his name was established in Santiago de Compostela, and which today collects most of his plastic production.