Daniel Vázquez Díaz moved to Madrid when he was very young. There, he studied the great masters of the Museo del Prado, particularly Velázquez, El Greco, Goa and Zurbarán. In 1906 he travelled to Paris, where he remained for fifteen years; memories endured from that stay, which he captured in writing for the ABC newspaper of Madrid and which were compiled after his death. They covered the different artists and friends he knew there such as Amedeo Modigliani, Ignacio Zuloaga, Ramón Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, to name but a few; those articles show his great understanding and his humanity. He exhibited with Picasso and Gris in 1908. He married Danish sculptor Eva Aggerholm (b. Sæby, 1879) and remained in the French capital when World War I broke out in 1914. Vázquez Díaz visited the battlefronts and made etchings of the martyr cities. However, difficulties in making a living drove him back to Spain, where he had to overcome misgivings about his style, derived from Cubism, which was overly daring for Madrid academics. However, he was understood by some intellectuals of the Generation of ’98, whom he portrayed in stark and striking works: Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Azorín, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rubén Darío, Manuel de Falla, José Gutiérrez Solana, José Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón, etc.

Vázquez Díaz sought to reconcile the demands of that stark, typically Cubist, rectilinear style where greys prevailed with traditional painting. In 1926 he painted The Monks, a tribute to the painter of the friars, Zurbarán. That style culminated in his fresco paintings, entitled Poem of Discovery, at La Rábida Monastery (Huelva), which were closely linked to the feats of Christopher Columbus and were commissioned by the Government in 1929. He also produced outstanding works on the subject of bullfighting, but rather than capturing the performance in the ring he depicted majestic groups of bullfighters posing for posterity: imaginary (but real) cuadrillas (teams) of Largartijo and Frascuelo, of Juan Centeno and Mazzantini. He was also a remarkable landscape artist, producing admirable, stark landscapes, particularly of the Basque Country.

He built up an international reputation with exhibitions in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Egypt, the United States, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere, and his accolades included several Spanish and foreign gold medals and the Grand Prix of the First Hispano-American Biennial. Vázquez Díaz died in 1969.

In 1999, the Daniel Vázquez Díaz Contemporary and Modern Art Centre was opened in his hometown of Nerva.

• Julián Gállego Serrano
• María José Alonso