José Guerrero

JOSÉ GUERRERO (Granada, 1914 - Barcelona, 1991).
Untitled, 1981.
Gouache on lithographic poster.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by the José Guerrero Center.
Work painted on the poster made for the exhibition of José Guerrero at the Joan Miró Foundation in Parc Monjuic".
This work will be included in the 3rd Edition of the José Guerrero Catalogue Raisonné.
Signed and dedicated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 96 x 67 cm; 113 x 83 cm (frame).
This work combines two facets of José Guerrero's artistic career. Starting with lithography as a base, the artist intervenes with gouache almost the entire piece, creating a work where the same aesthetic language expressed through different techniques converges. In this evocative work by Guerrero, the artist recreates in an abstract and lyrical way the landscape of Frigiliana, a town near Nerja where the painter lived after his return from New York. Frigiliana became a refuge for the artist, inspiring numerous works such as the present one, in which he transports us to the colors of the white villages of Andalusia, with their characteristic blue doors and lattices. Aesthetically Guerrero breaks the monochrome of blue with subtle touches of black and pink that recreate the flamingos common in the salt flats of the area, in such a way that converts reality into a visual poetry where the subtle use of glazes recreate the unique and specific atmosphere of the place where Guerrero spent the last years of his life.
A Spanish painter and engraver who became a naturalized American citizen, José Guerrero developed his work within abstract expressionism. He began his training at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios in Granada, and soon moved to Madrid to continue his studies at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he was a student of Daniel Vázquez Díaz. In 1942 he obtained a scholarship from the Casa de Velázquez, and in 1945 he moved to Paris thanks to a new scholarship, this time granted by the French government. In the French capital he got to know first hand the European avant-garde, and came into contact with the Spanish painters of the School of Paris. Since then, his work is full of avant-garde echoes and Picasso's signs, clearly visible in this work, features that he will abandon in the fifties, when he discovers abstract expressionism in New York. He arrived in that city in 1950, encouraged by his wife, the New York journalist Roxana Pollock, whom he had married a year earlier. In 1954 he exhibited with Joan Miró at the Art Club of Chicago, an exhibition that meant his definitive international projection. His dealer was Betty Parson, one of the most important gallery owners in New York at the time. Guerrero's style then changed completely, showing a profound influence of Rothko and Kline; he definitively abandoned figuration and built compositions where a marked tension between spaces, colors and unrecognizable objects was evident. He returns to Spain in 1965, and participates in the creation of the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca. He soon returned to New York, although he continued to make trips to Spain. His production, which continues to be characterized by the power of masses of color, planes and lines, is influenced at this time by Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. Today, José Guerrero is recognized as one of the most outstanding Spanish painters of the New York School. He achieved early recognition, being named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1959. Likewise, in 1976 his first anthological exhibition was held in his hometown. In 1984 he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, and in 1989 he was decorated by the Rodriguez Acosta Foundation. In 2000 the art center that bears his name was inaugurated in Granada, created from the donation made by his widow to the Provincial Council. He is also represented in various museums and collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, the MOMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the British Museum and the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.