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

Collection

Poniente (Paisaje) [Looking West (Landscape)]

Image caption
BENJAMÍN PALENCIA

Poniente (Paisaje) [Looking West (Landscape)]

  • 1972
  • Oil on canvas
  • 65 x 81 cm
  • Cat. P_14
  • Acquired in 1975
By:
Julián Gállego Serrano, María José Alonso, Carlos Martín

The understatement in Benjamín Palencia’s landscapes in his final years is in keeping with a common attitude, a mixture of avant-garde language and tradition when choosing his enclaves and approaches to the theme, united in the free-and-easy, sometimes violent use of a free-flowing, fiery colour range. The artist who in his youth reached out to Surrealism to produce exceptional scenes with biomorphic-like tortured figures returned later in life to more conventional poetics that, however, continued to venture into the new to rediscover the Castilian landscape.

The goals set by the landmark Vallecas School, where Palencia, Alberto Sánchez, Francisco San José and Agustín Redondela, to name but a few, provided a new ground-breaking approach to the Castilian plateau, left a permanent mark on the generation of painters who followed in their wake. And the three landscapes in the Banco De España Collection lead us to say that the legacy of Benjamín Palencia’s mature years is to do with the memory of a steady impetus, of a mastery of pictorial and ideological rethinking of rural Spain. In this regard, Palencia does not search out the poetics of the bleak moorland to such a great extent, but seeks rather to explore a more optimistic view, e.g. in the cypresses of Dusk in Castile (1974) — in which it seems to recall the ‘cypress world’ of Gerardo Diego, who also used the tree as a metaphor for the mystique of the countryside — and in the ploughed land with the promise of its harvest in Landscape(1967).

 
By:
Julián Gállego Serrano, María José Alonso
Benjamín Palencia
Barrax (Albacete) 1894 - Madrid 1970

Benjamín Palencia came from a family who worked the land, but he moved to Madrid in 1909 and took up drawing. He entered the First Autumn Salon with a symbolic composition of Larra, and befriended Juan Ramón Jiménez, Francisco Gutiérrez Cossío, Salvador Dalí, Francisco Bores, José María de Ucelay and other students at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, where Palencia did not study. In 1923, he published Niños [Children], an album of drawings with texts by Juan Ramón Jiménez, with the Índice publishing house. Palencia travelled to Paris, where he became friends with Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris and worked at the Grand Chaumière Academy. He took part in the I Exhibition of Iberian Artists and founded the Vallecas School with Alberto Sánchez, which would be highly influential on the pre-war artistic scene. In 1928 he exhibited at the Modern Art Museum and travelled to Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. In 1930, he exhibited again at the Madrid Museum of Modern Art, he wrote Giotto, raíz viva de la pintura and Los Nuevos artistas españoles and exhibited at the Loeb Gallery in Paris. After the Spanish Civil War, the Vallecas School movement re-emerged at Cerro Artesa, where it would last for two years and garner followers including Francisco San José, Álvaro Delegado and Luis García-Ochoa. Palencia then moved to Villafranca de la Sierra in Ávila. He was awarded the Third Place Medal at the 1941 National Exhibition of Fine Arts and the First Place Medal for View of Toledo in 1943. His canvases appeared in the anthologies of the Academy of Art Critics, which sponsored the Salon of the Eleven, from 1944 to 1946.

 
«Masterpieces from the Banco de España Collection», Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander (Santander, 1993). «Essential Landscapes» (Huesca, 2007).
Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez & Julián Gállego Banco de España. Colección de pintura, Madrid, Banco de España, 1985. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Julián Gállego & María José Alonso Colección de pintura del Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 1988. Francisco Calvo Serraller Obras maestras de la Colección Banco de España, Santander, Museo de Bellas Artes y Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, 1993. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 1.