Esteban Vicente

ESTEBAN VICENTE PÉREZ (Turégano, Segovia, 1903 - New York, 2001).
Untitled.
Oil on paper adhered to board.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 21 x 29 cm; 32 x 40 cm (frame).

Esteban Vicente was the only Spanish artist who belonged to the first generation of abstract expressionists in New York. He took an active part in many of the transcendental events that were organized in this city at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, such as the exhibitions "Talent 1950" (Kootz Gallery, NY, 1950) or "9th Street" (NY, 1951). The latter was the one that consecrated the first generation of artists of the New York School in front of the world. Among his friendships during this period were the critics Harold Rosenberg, Thomas B. Hess, and the painters Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess. Hess, or the painters De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, among many others.

Esteban Vicente enters, in 1921, in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando, in Madrid, with the purpose of training as a sculptor, but soon decides to devote himself to painting. In 1928 he held his first exhibition, after which he went to Paris, where he remained until 1930. He returned to Spain and exhibited in Barcelona and Madrid, and after the outbreak of the Civil War he worked in hiding in the mountains surrounding the capital. However, the same year of 1936 he decides to go to New York, his wife's place of origin. There he exhibited for the first time at the Kleeman Gallery in 1937. Four years later he obtained the American nationality since, having been a supporter of the Republican side, he decided not to return to Spain. He carried out numerous commissions and exhibitions in the following years, and between 1947 and 1947 he was a professor of painting at the University of Puerto Rico. Upon his return to the United States he established a relationship with the nascent New York School, participating in his exhibitions at the Kootz Gallery (1950), the Ninth Street Art Exhibition (1951) and the Sidney Janis and Egan Galleries. He was a founding member of the New York Studio School, where he taught for thirty-six years. From the eighties onwards his work began to be known in Spain, retrospectives were dedicated to him (Banco Exterior, 1987, and Museo Reina Sofía, 1997) and he was awarded mentions such as the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1990) and the Great Cross of Alfonso X the Wise (1999). In 1998 the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in Segovia, where a large part of his work is preserved today. Vicente's works are kept in major contemporary art museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim and the MOMA in New York, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the Withney Museum of American Art or the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.