Esteban Vicente
Turégano (Segovia) 1903 - Bridgehampton 2001

The time he spent at the Royal Academy of San Fernando and his stays in London and Paris were milestones in Esteban Vicente’s education as an artist. While he was in Madrid, he came into contact with the literary circle of Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Rafael Alberti, and published his first drawings in the literary journals Verso y Prosa and Mediodía. In 1929 a grant from the Board for the Extension of Studies enabled him to travel to Paris, where he mixed with Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and his first wife, the American Estelle Charney. Between 1930 and 1934, his work was exhibited in Madrid and Barcelona, and he moved to New York shortly afterwards when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Vicente would remain there for the rest of his life, apart from a short period in Philadelphia, where he worked with the Republican Government abroad, and some time in 1945 spent at the University of San Juan in Puerto Rico along with his second wife, the writer María Teresa Babín.

Vicente then experimented with pseudo-cubist tenets and embraced the avant-garde influences acquired in Paris until 1950, when his work was selected by the art critics Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro to form part of the ‘Talents’ exhibition organised at the Kootz Gallery. The following year he exhibited again with the future masters of the New York School at the ‘9^th Street’ show. At that time he joined the North-American abstract expressionism school, in which he enjoyed a successful career that would lead him to teach at such prestigious institutions as the Black Mount School and the New York Studio School, which he helped to set up. From then on, his interest in colour, light and matter steered his research in visual arts towards seeking his own pictorial language based on the balance between form and colour planes.

In 1986 his work began to be rediscovered in Spain with the Banco Exterior exhibition. In 1991 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fine Arts; in 1995 the IVAM held the first anthological exhibition of his work in Spain; and in 1998 the Estaban Vicente Museum was opened in Segovia, to which the artist made a large donation, and at the same time the Museo Reina Sofia held a major anthological exhibition of his oeuvre. The following year, Vicente received the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise. His canvases are part of the collections of leading international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and the Tate Gallery (London).

Beatriz Herráez