|
|
|
Francisco Bores' (Madrid, 6th May, 1898 - Paris, 11th May, 1972) long, quiet and intense working life as a painter reminds us, and brings into sharp relief, how little time separates us from the origins of modernity in Spain, through this significant exhibition dedicated to him by the Leandro Navarro Gallery to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his birth,. These origins timidly began in the transition years from the 19th to the 20th century - a world so different from ours that it seems to have existed an eternity ago, when in reality it is only a few decades away. Ten decades have been more than enough to change not only the notion and condition of a work of art and the professional and social status of our artists, but also their very historic discourse. A hundred years ago, art histories dealt with tradition; that is, with recognized artists, with painters and sculptors who were consecrated by the Academy. But from precisely then onwards, modern art histories began to look more closely at experimentalists - in other words, with the avant-garde of a generation whose representatives immediately became the maestros of the following generation. Nowadays, when we talk about painters from Bores' generation, it is not considered strange at all that - as Arnason pointed out - they are referred to as "the old masters" of our modern art, when, however, they belonged for most of their lives to "a struggling minority, surrounded by a multitude of successful artists who have now fallen into oblivion". Within these poetics, Leandro Navarro's keen instinct - apart from a renowned gallery-owner, he is an important collector - has tried to gather and bring together for this homage to Bores, alongside the "old master"'s own works (clearly pieces that are a testimony to the discourse of his language and his art between the thirties and sixties), a varied series of pictorial and sculptural proposals by the artist's closest friends, who - like himself - made up that unorthodox "struggling minority" who had to leave for Paris to become the "modern" painters and sculptors that they wanted to be. Bores, therefore, and a group of his closest friends from among the elite of the second Spanish generation of the Paris school - Hernando Viñes (1904-1993), Pancho Cossío (1894-1970), Ginés Parra (1896-1960), Joaquín Peinado (1898-1975) and Baltasar Lobo (1910-1993) - form a structural concept and set the different successive paces for this exhibition.
This exhibition has also conformed to the intimate discretion, composed intelligence and elegant sense of opportunity that always distinguished Bores' life and painting. He liked to say, "the truth must be spoken in a low voice", and his friend, the ultraist poet Miguel Pérez Ferrero, described him as an "extremely reserved, quiet and modest" man. Furthermore, this is an exhibition where the chosen artists express themselves with total awareness of what was happening around them in Parisian painting between the wars - neo-impressionism, les Nabis, post-cubism, surrealism, fauvism - though with each and every one of them happy to follow their own path, deeply personal paths through an extraordinarily eclectic atmosphere. (One leaves exhibitions like this one wondering if the Paris school of painting was, definitively, something more than a certain French fragrance that, inaccessible and undefinable, could be felt in the respective workshops of the Spanish painters working in what was then the main capital of international modernity. Possibly- and fortunately - not). What "new" can we say of Bores' painting? It is always fitting to mention the constructive and, at the same time, poetic (deeply inventive and lyrical, moving) concept that he usually displays in his reorganization of the space of the painting in fields. They are complex plastic characters, rationalized and deeply-felt, which run alongside elements of his biography; an engineering student before devoting his life to painting; a man with a cultured literary spirit, a friend of poets and a fine illustrator of magazines and books. He called "spatial lyricism" this way of organizing the painting on a framework of horizontals and verticals, and simultaneously on "a St. Andrews' Cross" - as Carlos Areán put it - "allowing him to give a particular stability to the whole". Thus, his imaginative capacity rose above the neo-cubist outlines - of synthetic cubism - in his peculiar compositions in synthesis. Another highly creative facet of Bores' painting comes from his sense of colour. From the outset, Bores made patently clear his love of rich, dense pictorial texture, and he consistently used a striking wealth of colour, even when his palette was relatively restrained. As his career progressed, his use of colour became more and more refined, exquisite, brilliant and joyful, until he recovered the whole spectrum of colour-light, dazzling in his "white period", in the decade of the 50s.
A third substantial element stems from his ability for formal synthesis, his quintassential synthetism of shape. Reason and vision. Concept and feeling. Strict geometry and effectively plastic softness. These are the contrasting criteria that explain the unique, progressive process of this painting's abstraction, which, in turn, never ceased to refer to specific outside realities: those of his nearest world; the simple iconographic repertoire of the corners of his house and workshop. A vision from a geometric viewpoint and a creative use of areas of abstract colour. All this - and its process - unfolds before our eyes in this exhibition, it is all "explained" in the chronological succession of paintings set out in the gallery's main hall. In the two paintings of interiors with figures, from the thirties (the period Bores called "fruit-painting"), the painter abandons the normal perspective formula and frontalizes the scene in a post-cubist fashion. The drawing - in Matissian lines - is as personal as it is synthetic. And the colour is reminiscent of Bonnard, even of Vuillard, with his palette of dull browns and greys, but all with nuances of a very peculiar deep blue. In the following decade, the forties, there is a special alliance of geometry and magic in works as surprising - for they were unexpected - and beautifully coloured as that landscape called "Le ciel gris perle", crossed by a network of lines and symbols, strangely reminiscent of Klee. This was the period the painter classified as "spatial syntheses" par excellence. From the fifties, the years of his remarkable "white manner", we have here the outstanding "Nature mort aux carises", from 1954, having come from his main Parisian dealer, the Galerie Lois Carré. Another of the exhibition's main pieces is the "Composition au rideau de fleurs", from 1961, in elegant large format, and deeply abstracted forms and delicate colours, full of nuances and values, where we can "see" how the painter's vision - together with a concept of painting and his organization of colour - modifies and transforms the sense of what the painting represents. (For example, the fruit-bowl becomes a skull, in such a way that the painting can be interpreted through "panels", without being so in a literal iconographic sense). Finally, in the paintings from the seventies, we can see how Bores returns to deep, intense colours, the condition of "plasticity", which he so much appreciated. A tour around this marvellous panorama or frieze of paintings exhibited in the gallery's main hall leave no room for doubt as to how unique Bores' calligraphic, refined and elegant language was. And his "French" references (Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, especially) are no more than the effective study and interesting consideration they had in the formation - though not definition - of our painter's style. Bores himself explained it well, when he spoke of his early times in Paris: "Everything was new to me. Impressionism, cubism, surrealism... everything lay before me like an array of pharmacist's jars with incomprehensible labels. I went along trying a little of everything, hoping to come across the magic drug that gave happiness and long life. I understood in time that the impulse that makes a young painter stand forth is worth more than all those prescriptions and I decided never to return to the pharmacy". (Quote included by Julián Gallego in his text for the catalogue from the significant anthological exhibition on Bores held by the Dirección General de Patrimonio Artístico y Cultural, Madrid, 1976). Bores was decidedly Bores. This explains the growing appreciation of his work by critics and international markets, a critical opinion and market that always, from the outset, had held him in greater esteem than his peers in Paris. On the other hand, this exhibition highlights the especially intimate, silent register of Bores' art - both in iconographic and pictorial terms - by dedicating an area - the gallery's entrance hall - to his gouaches and water-colours. The limpid purity, the transparency and luminosity of the landscape, and the intensity or poetic penetration of the artist's eye over small objects of his everyday world, show how the artist was always able to give commonplace things an aura of something extraordinary, raising it to the condition of the unattainable and, therefore, coveted.
As we have already mentioned, the exhibition is complemented and developed – like a musical composition – in different "movements" with their own rhythms, set by the presence of five selected friends of Bores: the painters H. Viñes, P. Cossío, J. Peinado, G. Parra and the sculptor B. Lobo. Past the entrance, the little hall dedicated to Hernando Viñes is dominated by an unforgettable canvas: "El café", from 1929, a piece which could easily have been the work of a young Bores. This is fascinating, unequivocal "poetic painting", where spaces – both interior and exterior – overlap with plains, architecture, figures, representations and dreams, even abstractions. It is a specially significant work from Viñes' first - and little-documented - period, which, as Valeriano Bozal has pointed out, was characterized by expressing "a world in a process of formation which, effectively, has recently received the most rigorous cubist organization"". The area dedicated to the small "suite" of paintings by Pancho Cossío (who, like Bores and at the same time as him, was first a disciple of Cecilio Pla in Madrid) highlights the tremendous differences that existed between various members of the so-called Paris school. What has been selected here are mature pieces: dense paintings, of a rich texture and quality, highly abstract, a painting that aims to stress the values of pure chromatic colour and light, rather than to represent the theme of its figurative basis. The complete, marvellous and well-known "Bodegón con botellas y brevas" particularly stands out here, and in which the "brevas" (figs) of the title (obviously not the painter's) are actually birds pecking on the table. This anecdote illustrates the degree of deep abstraction which – as we have said – Cossío practised on the forms and figures of his reference themes. (With this still-life from 1967, the painter took part in the Biennial of Alexandria). In the gallery's back halls, we have arranged paintings by Joaquín Peinado and Ginés Parra. The two still-lifes by Peinado (from 1974-75), brought together for this exhibition, form an authentic pair, or an interesting "pendant". We can see here – since in both paintings (so well differentiated), the elements that make them up are almost identical – the extraordinary play on compositional possibilities offered by the still-life genre. From cubism onwards, this contributed to making still-life one of the Paris school's favourite genres. In conclusion, the two paintings in question are both highly refined, realised in tones of white, browns and greys, with a clear development of orthogonal geometry, and with a curiously "ascendant" compositional accent – in spite of the fact that the formats are horizontal–. Ginés Parra, on the other hand, exhibits here the well known figure composition "Danza. (Parejas de mujeres bailando)" – the painting that represented this artist in the historic exhibition "El arte de la España republicana. Artistas españoles de la Escuela de París", held in Prague in 1946 – a marvellous, extraordinarily plastic "Naturaleza muerta con melón" and a memorable landscape of the Siene in Paris entitled "Armonia en gris" (1956). This complete, powerful composition is arranged around the quality of large areas of colour (white, green, grey), and a structured, synthetic, geometric layout (highlighted by expressive strokes of black). This is a work to be considered within the process of our landscape painting, due to its particular formal synthetism and its expressive force, in a purely plastic register. Finally, like some kind of "continuum" register set among the different rhythms that give this exhibition its structure, the sculpture of Baltasar Lobo has been displayed through several halls; an important series of bronzes – all cast during the artist's life, under his control – whose bare volumes perfectly draw out the fluctuations of light and shade. Lobo's particular quality as a "curvilinear cubist" sculptor – in the sense of the sinuous movement of extraordinarily free organic shapes – includes some perfect examples here. Compact masses, nobly "swollen" volumes, material richness, a concept of metamorphosis of shapes, a baroque-style movement of volumes through space, an absolute mastery of the plastic medium (in its normal acceptance of the sensorial "softness" of the material being moulded), an intelligently tight arrangement of the whole... These are the powers of such solid sculpture, of curvilinear Contours, whose outlines play on shapes, surfaces, masses and space. One more paradigm of the substantial "difference" of the Spaniards in the Paris school. In conclusion, this exhibition-homage to Bores by the Leandro Navarro Gallery fulfils its justly commemorative aim, and what is more, leads us to feel a need for a new consideration and an up-to-date evaluation of the Spanish artists in Paris between the wars and in our post-civil war, to the need to sensibly understand a number of artists who practised "a tempered modernity" – as Calvo Serraller expressively put it -, whose effects have ended up being much closer to now than "their moment", and continue to be revived, instead of obscured, by the clarifying discourse of time. JOSE MARÍN-MEDINA |
|
© LEANDRO NAVARRO, 2006
|
