Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Cabeza [Head]

Image caption
ANTONIO SAURA

Cabeza [Head]

  • 1958
  • Oil on canvas
  • 60 x 72,2 cm
  • Cat. P_428
  • Acquired in 1989
By:
Carlos Martín

'A painting is first and foremost a blank surface that needs to be filled with something. The canvas is an unlimited battlefield. The painter engages in a tragic, sensual hand-to-hand combat with it. With his gestures, he transforms an inert, passive material into a passionate cyclone, a cosmogonic energy that will radiate ever after.' Saura wrote this description in 1958, around the same time as he painted the works in the Banco de España Collection. It establishes a new concept of the pictorial work, in which the corporal, the dramatic and the notion of struggle prevail. Saura founded the El Paso group in 1957 and it was during the second half of the 1950s that he found his place in the tradition of Spanish Baroque painting, from which he drew blackness and drama and the tragedy of the dislocated human body. In this way, he found ties to the earth and a 'national' root for his work. Indeed, enthusiastic contemporary critics saw him as blending the dramaticism of El Greco and Goya with the robust austerity of Zurbarán. Despite these local references, however, there is a more transnational component to Saura, with links to the late surrealism that infused his early work. Indeed, the two pieces in the Banco de España collection are representative of two distinct approaches to André Breton's 'convulsive beauty', which proved so enticing to the young Saura.

Head was made in 1958, the year that Saura represented Spain at the Venice Biennale. It cannot be divorced from the Surrealists’ fondness for the phantoms of amputation, ultimately derived from anatomical studies. The outline of the head is only lightly sketched. It is detached from the body, and has a large degree of dramaticism, resulting from associations with a sort of expressive, tormented skull, or the severed head of John the Baptist, one of the first metamorphoses of a fantasy that was especially successful in the Spanish Baroque. One perceives in it a certain compositional interest that makes it resemble a still life or vanitas expressed through the filter of the fatalist post-war Picasso or the graphic work of an artist like Robert Matta (with whom it is linked by that lively constellation of sgraffito lines). Clearly, this is a Saura who was still trying to develop a gestural style of his own. Even after achieving this goal, he occasionally returned to the motif of the disembodied head until shortly before his death. Given the early date, the work may have been intended as a 'self-portrait', as Saura viewed it. Several aspects support this hypothesis. Saura's interest in the head motif in the late 1950s was partly inspired by the self-portrait. The painting bears an extraordinary likeness to other works such as Self-portrait (1959, R. Stadler Collection, Paris), which are identical in size and have almost exactly the same features. And finally, the artist himself left us a clue of his own: 'By not referring specifically to any particular face, and given that these works were made by my own hand, I thought they might reflect something of myself. I therefore chose this equivocal title which still bring me a certain demythologising joy.'

Carlos Martín

 
By:
Frederic Montornés
Antonio Saura
Huesca 1930 - Cuenca 1998

Forced to spend five years in bed recovering from TB, Saura was an autodidact. He began to write and paint in 1943. Following his recovery, in 1951 he travelled to Paris for the first time. He later returned to the city to live between 1954 and 1955. During his time there, he struck up a friendship with Benjamin Péret and mixed with the surrealists. As a result, on his return to Spain in 1957, he and other artists and writers (among others, Luis Feito, Rafael Canogar, Martín Chirino or José Ayllón), founded the group El Paso, which he directed and led until it was broken up in 1960. In 1966 he travelled to Cuba and in 1967 he returned to Paris, where he settled permanently, enjoying increasing international acclaim. Throughout his career, Saura took part in numerous seminars, talks and conferences on art and culture; collaborated in filmmaking projects; curated exhibitions; designed theatre sets; and through his writings, which he began to publish in the late 1970s and early 1980s, laid the foundations of his political position. In 1985 he designed the set for Woyzeck, directed by Eusebio Lázaro, in Madrid; In 1991 he participated with his brother Carlos Saura and Luis García Navarro in the production of the opera Carmen for the Staatstheater in Stuttgart. He died in Cuenca in 1998. Saura received numerous awards and recognitions: the Guggenheim Award (1960), the Carnegie Award (1964), Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres de France (1981) and Gold Medal for Fine Arts (1982).

Saura was initially influenced by surrealism, Michel Tapié's seminal book Un Art Autre and the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Due to his reflective intensity, behind the composition and pictorial gesture of his work, one senses a desire to show that part of the human being, somewhere between the beautiful and the grotesque, that naturally affords us a view of his most instinctive feelings. His work bears his own unmistakable authorial stamp, with an abstract expression formed of paint marks and an austerity of colour. It seeks not only to draw out the turbulences of the artist himself, but also those of everyone who considered him to be the quintessential painter of sadness and rebellion.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Sala Libros in Zaragoza in 1950. Many others followed, at venues that included the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Germany, 1964); Casa de las Américas (Havana, 1966); the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1963, 1964 and 1979); Galería Maeght (Barcelona, 1975); the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1980); the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid, 1982); Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United USA, 1989); the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva, Switzerland, 1989); the Instituto Cervantes in Paris (1992); and the Museo d'Arte della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland, 1994). Since his death, several solo exhibitions of his work have been held, including 'Damas', at the Juan March Foundation (Madrid, 2005); 'Itinerarios de Antonio Saura' [Itineraries of Antonio Saura]', at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); 'Songe et mensonge / une parabole moderne (1958-1962) d'Antonio Saura', in Les Abattoirs (Toulouse, France, 2006). In 2016 his work was shown as part of the major exhibition 'Campo cerrado. Arte y poder en la posguerra española. 1939-1953' ['Campo Cerrado. Art and power in the Spanish Post-War period'], at the Museo Reina Sofía. He participated in the Venice Biennale with Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies (1958) and later as an artist and member of the organising committee (1976).

Frederic Montornés

 
«ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair» (Madrid, 1989). «Masterpieces from the Banco de España Collection», Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander (Santander, 1993). «Antonio Saura», Centro Cultural Las Claras (Murcia, 2001). «From Goya to our times. Perspectives of the Banco de España Collection», Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Rabat, 2017-2018). «Flowers & Fruit. Banco de España Collection», Banco de España (Madrid, 2022-2023).
Francisco Calvo Serraller Obras maestras de la Colección Banco de España, Santander, Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander y Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, 1993. Fernando Francés & Emmanuel Guigon Antonio Saura, Murcia, Centro Cultural Las Claras, 2001. Yolanda Romero & Isabel Tejeda De Goya a nuestros días. Miradas a la Colección Banco de España, Madrid & Rabat, AECID y FMN, 2017. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3. Vv.Aa. Flores y frutos. Colección Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 2022.