Modest Cuixart - European Contemporary Art

Modest Cuixart  (1925-2007)

"Painter, draftsman, printmaker and scenographer Spanish. He was born in Barcelona on November 2, 1925 and passed away in Palamós (Girona) on October 31, 2007.In 1944 he joined the Faculty of medicine, but abandoned it in 1946 to devote himself completely to painting. In 1948 he participated in the founding of the magazine Dau al set and in the Group of the same name, being the first and most important manifestation of Spanish surrealism of post-war linking innovative movements after the war with the avant-garde of the first third of the century, together with Arnau Puig, Joan Brossa, Tharrats and Tàpies. Two years later, took part in the "second week of art" organized by the "School of Altamira", where he became friends with Willi Baumeister, Lloréns Artigas, Luis Felipe Vivanco and Ricardo Gullón, among others.In 1951 he travelled to France, alternating her residence between Lyon and Paris. His first paintings and drawings, in the Decade of the 1940s, are assigned to expressionism. Then it went through a surreal stage linked to fantastic and dreamlike, images in the time of "Dau to Set". In the Decade of the fifties evolved into a painting informalist and material that uses the "dripping" and collage, to end up going to a painting which will progressively accentuating of expressionist figuration, with a special interest in the female figure and "erotic" images. Cuixart Antigone of the Ballet Moderne de Paris made a substantial graphic works, as well as decorations and theatrical costumes, including those carried out for the ballet in 1964. In 1958 he won prize Torres García and in 1959 the painting prize of the 'V biennial of São Paulo".The Dau al Set room organized in 1975 a sample retrospective which incorporated his work from the first steps of 1942. Representative pieces of each of the phases crossed by Cuixart, from his time there could see magicista and surrealist of Dau al Set, up to the abarrocada and neomodernista figuration of recent times, passing through his abstract phase of calligrams, "dripping", collages and painting material from mid-1950s, and the period through which blooms materic and the viscous exuberancias of informalism diluted slowly giving space to those sensual presence and obsessive frivolous woman with Hat plant, disturbing allegories of the grim reaper who populate his latest paintings. Despite the incessant changes and fluctuations of the interest of the painter between the materials and the strictly formal, exists in Cuixart a constant that gives unity to the whole of his contribution: the magical element, the use of a hermetic language of symbols, the embodiment of a dark mystery magma; in the words of the poet Joan Perucho: "Cuixart is taca les mans amb the fosca". "(thebiography.us)

Modest Cuixart

Modest Cuixart  (1925-2007)
"Painter, draftsman, printmaker and scenographer Spanish. He was born in Barcelona on November 2, 1925 and passed away in Palamós (Girona) on October 31, 2007.In 1944 he joined the Faculty of medicine, but abandoned it in 1946 to devote himself completely to painting. In 1948 he participated in the founding of the magazine Dau al set and in the Group of the same name, being the first and most important manifestation of Spanish surrealism of post-war linking innovative movements after the war with the avant-garde of the first third of the century, together with Arnau Puig, Joan Brossa, Tharrats and Tàpies. Two years later, took part in the "second week of art" organized by the "School of Altamira", where he became friends with Willi Baumeister, Lloréns Artigas, Luis Felipe Vivanco and Ricardo Gullón, among others.

 In 1951 he travelled to France, alternating her residence between Lyon and Paris. His first paintings and drawings, in the Decade of the 1940s, are assigned to expressionism. Then it went through a surreal stage linked to fantastic and dreamlike, images in the time of "Dau to Set". In the Decade of the fifties evolved into a painting informalist and material that uses the "dripping" and collage, to end up going to a painting which will progressively accentuating of expressionist figuration, with a special interest in the female figure and "erotic" images. Cuixart Antigone of the Ballet Moderne de Paris made a substantial graphic works, as well as decorations and theatrical costumes, including those carried out for the ballet in 1964. In 1958 he won prize Torres García and in 1959 the painting prize of the 'V biennial of São Paulo".

 The Dau al Set room organized in 1975 a sample retrospective which incorporated his work from the first steps of 1942. Representative pieces of each of the phases crossed by Cuixart, from his time there could see magicista and surrealist of Dau al Set, up to the abarrocada and neomodernista figuration of recent times, passing through his abstract phase of calligrams, "dripping", collages and painting material from mid-1950s, and the period through which blooms materic and the viscous exuberancias of informalism diluted slowly giving space to those sensual presence and obsessive frivolous woman with Hat plant, disturbing allegories of the grim reaper who populate his latest paintings. Despite the incessant changes and fluctuations of the interest of the painter between the materials and the strictly formal, exists in Cuixart a constant that gives unity to the whole of his contribution: the magical element, the use of a hermetic language of symbols, the embodiment of a dark mystery magma; in the words of the poet Joan Perucho: "Cuixart is taca les mans amb the fosca". "(thebiography.us)

Modest Cuixart

"The Catalan artist Modest Cuixart, who has died aged 81 after a fall, was a leading figure in the post-civil war art movement in Spain that challenged the Franco dictatorship and reignited artistic creativity after the stagnation of the war years. Cuixart was one of those who fought to free themselves, not only from Franco's oppression and censorship, but from his heavy-handed attempt to bring the nation's artists under his wing.Unlike many of his fellow artists, Cuixart never went into permanent exile in Franco's time but, after the dictator sought to exploit his popularity by calling him "our contemporary Goya", he spent much of his time in France, chiefly Paris and Lyon. Unlike Picasso, he refused to have his works exhibited by Franco's government in the Spanish pavilion at the World's Fair in New York in 1964. "We were the opposition, we were the left, we were anarchists," he said many years later.

 Cuixart, who was known early in his career by the Spanish forename Modesto, rather than the Catalan Modest (in line with Franco's ban on public use of the Catalan or Basque languages), became a driving force behind the Spanish modern art movement of the latter half of the 20th century. Along with his cousin, Antoni Tàpies, he used his paintings to express what could not be articulated during Franco's strongest years. By the early 1960s, Cuixart's abstract works were being exhibited in galleries worldwide, from the Guggenheim in New York to the Tate in London.

 In 1948, together with Tàpies and poet Joan Brossa, Cuixart co-founded the Dau al Set group - Catalan painters and poets who criticised the dictatorship through surreal paintings and writings and became the vanguard of Spain's drive to get out of its artistic and spiritual stagnation. The group was initially influenced by surrealism and dadaism, by Max Ernst and Paul Klee, not least by fellow Catalans Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. By 1956, when Dau al Set members went their separate ways, Cuixart had become a leading exponent of the informalist school and later of abstract painting. To give "grit" to his paintings, he used, literally, grit, or sand, straw, cloth or whatever he felt appropriate, to add texture to his canvasses. He once said textures conveyed the feel of the civil war and its aftermath, a feel that lingers not only in his art but in present-day Spanish life, despite the return to democracy. New baroque was how he described his work during Franco's regime. By the early 1960s, he was working with collage and producing the type of works which would soon become described as pop-art.
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 Cuixart was born in Barcelona. Although he loved drawing as a child, he studied medicine in 1944 until the after-effects of the civil war drove him in 1947 to abandon his desire to become a doctor and to take up art full time, initially influenced by the expressionists. Soon afterwards, along with Tàpies, he met Miró in Paris, and later, in the same city, Picasso, who, though born in Andalucia, had studied art in Barcelona.
In 1959, Cuixart gained international recognition when he won the prize for best painter at the São Paolo Bienal in Brazil. Among other shortlisted contestants was Francis Bacon, while Barbara Hepworth won the grand prize for her sculptures. After the awards, Time magazine wrote: "Cuixart makes elegant mud pies, the blackest and heaviest in the notably gloomy Spanish exposition. Black may always be in fashion, especially in Spain. Yet the spirit of Goya is clearly not with Cuixart. He makes despair chic."

 From the early 1970s, Cuixart made his home in the town of Palafrugell, near Palamós in the Catalan province of Girona. Since 1998, the town has been the site of the Cuixart foundation, a museum in his honour. Until shortly before his death, Cuixart, who gave up painting in 2002, could regularly be seen drinking and exchanging ideas with artists and tourists in the Can Moni restaurant and bar in Palamós.
Modest Cuixart, artist, born November 2 1925; died October 31 2007"(www.theguardian.com)