The son of José Viñes Roda, a French engineer from a Catalan family, and María Soto, the daughter of a former president of Honduras, Hernando Viñes was influenced by the early avant-gardes and was part of the Paris School, along with other Spanish artists including Joaquín Peinado, with whom he shared a studio, Pancho Cossío and Francisco Bores. Viñes became interested in painting when he visited the Prado Museum at the age of twelve, after his family had fled France when World War I broke out and settled in Madrid. He returned to Paris in 1919 and, on the advice of Picasso, he attended the Sacred Art workshops run by the nabi artist Maurice Denis and George Desvalières, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He later attended André Lothe’s classes and worked at Gino Severini’s atelier, where he came into contact with Cubist painting. In 1923 he was commissioned to make the scenery for Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show, along with Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, and exhibited at the Paris Autumn Salon with a work influenced by Picasso. In 1931 he married Lulú Jourdain, who became his muse and model for highly sensual, colourful works. With the outbreak of World War II, he fled with his family to the French town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. His work blended influence of cubism and fauvism, which he mainly developed in the landscape genre in very colourful pieces with a formal synthesis. In many of his works, he used the compositional resource of the window as a painting within a painting. He also used aspects of poetic surrealism influenced by his friend Luis Buñuel. In 1946 he returned to Paris and was forced to teach guitar to survive in the following decades. In the 1960s, after a retrospective at the Madrid Modern Art Museum in 1965 and the signing of a contract with the Theo Gallery, his career was revived and from then on he mainly focused on depicting the landscape of the Basque coasts and of Brittany.

Viñes was part of such landmark exhibitions as ‘El arte de la República española. Artistas ibéricos de la Escuela de París’ [‘The Art of the Spanish Republic. Iberian Artists of the Paris School’] (1946), which was taken to the Prague National Gallery, the Moravia Gallery, (Brno, Czechoslovakia) and the Ostrava Visual Arts Gallery (Ostrava, Czechoslovakia). Stand-out solo shows of his works were held at the Casa de España (Paris, 1983); Santander Municipal Museum of Fine Art (1986); the Musée Bonnat (Bayonne, France, 1987); the Barbizon Gallery (Paris, 1998 and 2000); the Telefónica Foundation (Madrid, 1999-2000); and Caja Duero (Valladolid & Salamanca, 2004, Cáceres, 2005). In 1988 he was awarded the Spanish Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.

Roberto Díaz