Skip to main content

Josep de Togores Biography

Josep de Togores

(Josep de Togores i Llach; Cerdanyola, 1893-Barcelona, ​​1970) Spanish painter.After a first realistic stage, with a predominance of the nude, he drifted towards a style with a religious theme.He also worked on mural painting and book illustration.

Born into a wealthy family and with intellectual and artistic concerns, he soon revealed a great sensitivity for drawing.At thirteen years of age, he became deaf due to meningitis.In those years he was a drawing student of Joan Llaverias, who advised the father to let his son's artistic potential develop to the maximum.In 1906, father and son traveled to Paris and then to Belgium in the hope of curing the boy's deafness.

A year later, stimulated by the impression made on him by the Monet painting he saw at the International Exhibition in Barcelona, ​​Josep de Togores began to paint his first oil paintings.After a period of apprenticeship with Félix Mestres in Barcelona, ​​he painted some worthy paintings, the best known of which is El loco de Cerdanyola (1909), shown in the Parés room in Barcelona before it was awarded at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels (Belgium) and acquired by the Belgian Government.

Portrait of Madame Claire (1922), by Josep de Togores

With this work he opened what has been considered his impressionist stage.In 1911 he won a third medal at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition.Two years later, encouraged by his family, he went to Madrid for a few months to immerse himself in the painting of the Prado Museum, and that same year he returned to Paris with a grant from the Barcelona City Council.In the French capital he discovered painters who were to be decisive in the directions of aesthetic taste, mainly Cézanne and Matisse, from whom he drew fundamental lessons of classicism.With the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918), Togores decided to leave Paris and return to Barcelona.

It was then when, in contact with some representatives of the Catalan pictorial Noucentisme (Sunyer, Nogués, Casanovas or JM Junoy) and with the lesson learned in France, he began to abandon the impressionist procedures to pay more attention to the line, volume and materiality of objects.Once the drama of the death of his mother (1915) and the bankruptcy of the family fortune had been overcome, the art of Josep de Togores began to give its best.

In 1919 he settled again in the city of the Seine, this time for eleven years.There he frequented Picasso, Gris, Utrillo, Modigliani and other artists, although he remained in a precarious situation until he got a contract with the gallery owner Kahnweiler, thanks to which he exhibited successfully in various European capitals.In the catalog of his first solo exhibition (1922), Max Jacob spoke of "cubistic vigor", "linear composition", "constructive analyst", etc., characteristics that related his art to the new German objectivity and to the current Italian valori plastici .

Sleeping children (1927), by Josep de Togores

Some excellent paintings from the 1920s are the portrait by Aleix de Togores , Two nudes and Bathers , as well as numerous exceptionally crafted female nudes, in whose formal sense classical Picassian academicism is mixed and the close carnal vitality of the best Sunyer.In 1926 he held a triumphant exhibition in Barcelona, ​​but the city's official museums still considered his art too scandalous.Between 1928 and 1930 his work changed: bodies were derealized and transformed into almost abstract figures, which gradually drifted towards a kind of anthropomorphic calligraphy close to the aesthetics of French automatic surrealism.

After a few years of practicing this type of surrealism, quite strange in Spain, Togores returned to classicism and a conventional figuration, a bit standardized, but almost always of excellent technical invoice.In his last creative stage, he became interested in religious themes, encouraged by his activities as a restorer of ancient altarpieces.His graphic work destined for bibliophile editions is also of great interest.Since the mid-1940s he presented his works at the Sala Parés and also in galleries and museums in Madrid.It is represented, among others, in the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum (Madrid) and in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (Barcelona).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Claudio Williman Biography

Claudio Williman (Montevideo, 1863- id. , 1934) Uruguayan politician.He was a member of the Colorado Party, was Minister of Government (1904) and President of the Republic (1907-1911).During his tenure, markedly conservative, he strengthened the judiciary, created the Ministries of Public Works and Industry, and solved border problems with Brazil and Argentina.He left his senatorial seat to head the National Bank (1915).

Adolfo Bioy Casares Biography

Adolfo Bioy Casares (Buenos Aires, 1914-1999) Argentine writer, one of the most prominent authors of universal fantastic literature.Member of a family of Buenos Aires landowners, in 1929 he wrote Prologue , a manuscript that his father revised and had it printed.His early vocation for letters was encouraged by his family, and in 1933 he published the volume of short stories Seventeen shots against the future . Adolfo Bioy Casares Soon he became culturally linked to the cosmopolitan circle of Sur magazine; his friendship with Jorge Luis Borges would be decisive in his literary career.In 1932 he met Borges at the home of Victoria Ocampo, and also his sister Silvina Ocampo, who became his wife in 1940.The close friendship with Borges lasted until his death in 1986 and gave rise to a series of written works.in collaboration and signed with the pseudonyms of B.Suárez Lynch, H.Bustos Domecq, B.Lynch Davis and Gervasio Montenegro: Six problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942), Two mem...

Benedict VI Biography

Benedict VI (Rome,?- id ., 974) Pope of Roman origin (973-974).Successor of John XIII.Supported by the emperor Otto I the Great, when he died (973) he was left defenseless against Antipope Boniface VII.He was strangled to death in jail, where he had been held by order of Crescencio I, head of the Roman faction.

Josef Willem Mengelberg Biography

Josef Willem Mengelberg (Utrecht, 1871-Zuort, 1951) Dutch conductor.He studied in his hometown with Richard Hol, Henri Wilhelm Petri and Anton Averkamp and later moved to Cologne (Germany), in whose conservatory he studied theory and counterpoint with G.Jensen, piano with I.Seiss and organ with F.W.Franke, in addition to directing and composing with Franz Wüllner. He was musical director of the Lucerne Conservatory in 1892 and years later, in 1895, he obtained the position of director of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, a position he held until 1945.He also continued directing the Museum Concerts group in Frankfurt between 1907 and 1920.From 1899 he annually conducted the Amsterdam Toonkunst Choir in its interpretation of the Passion According to Saint Matthew by JS Bach. He also conducted the American National Symphony Orchestra in New York between 1920 and 1929 and was principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1921 until he left it due to differen...

Clément Ader Biography

Clément Ader (Muret, 1841-Toulouse, 1925) French aeronautical engineer.Already in his childhood he designed a large kite that could lift adult men off the ground.Ader was inventive, and in his youth he made a velocipede with rubber wheels and a balloon that he built during the Franco-Prussian War and that he gave to the city of Toulouse at the end of the war. In 1876 he left his job at the Administration des Ponts et Chaussées (Ministry of Bridges and Roads), he moved to Paris and devoted himself to communications.In 1880 he collaborated in the installation of the first private telephone line in the city, using components designed by him; one of them was the Théâtrophone , with which you could listen to opera from your own home.All of this brought him great income. Ader observed the flight of numerous species of birds and bats, which he captured and kept in facilities built in his own home.His purpose was to achieve a machine with a lifting force such that it counteracts that o...

Carl Jonas Love Almquist Biography

Carl Jonas Love Almquist (Stockholm, 1793-Bremen, 1866) Swedish writer.He is one of the first realist novelists in Sweden.Under the title of The book of the wild rose (1832-1851), he brought together numerous essays, novels and dramas, works in which he combined mysticism, eroticism and reformism.Of his poetic work, the collection of poems Sueños (1849) stands out.

Adela Zamudio Biography

Adela Zamudio (La Paz, 1854-Cochabamba, 1928) Bolivian poet.As a tribute and recognition of her work in favor of gender equality, Bolivia celebrates Women's Day on the date of her birth (October 11).The constant evocation of her activism, however, has not come to obscure the intrinsic value of her poetic work, which is situated in the transition from romanticism to modernism. Adela Zamudio Between her dedication to teaching and her literary activity, Adela Zamudio developed a significant sociocultural work in favor of the intellectual and social emancipation of women.She directed the first secular school in Bolivia in La Paz, and also founded the first painting school for women (1911) and later for children, in one of the suburbs of the capital.

Abel Janszoon Tasman Biography

Abel Janszoon Tasman (Lutjegast, Groningen, 1603-Batavia, today Jakarta, 1659) Dutch navigator.In his travels through the southern Pacific Ocean, borne by the governor general of the Company of the Dutch Indies, A.van Diemen, he discovered the island of Tasmania and the south island of New Zealand, in 1642, as well as the archipelagos of Fiji and Tonga, in 1643.In 1644 it entered the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia.

Jose Sanjurjo Biography

José Sanjurjo (José Sanjurjo y Sacanell; Pamplona, ​​1872-Estoril, Portugal, 1936) Spanish military.Orphan of a Carlist colonel, he pursued a military career and received destinations in Cuba (1894-98) and Morocco (1898-1921).He ascended by war merits to the generalship in 1921, the year in which he was appointed military governor of Zaragoza. José Sanjurjo From there he supported the coup d'état of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923), with whose dictatorship he collaborated closely.As general commander of Melilla, he prepared the landing of Al Hoceima (1925), which ended the Abd-el-Krim insurrection, consolidated the Spanish protectorate in Morocco and provided the dictatorship with one of its greatest successes.His work at the head of the Moroccan army earned him promotions, decorations, a title of nobility (Marquis del Rif, in 1927) and an uncontested prestige among young Africanist officers. When the Second Republic was proclaimed (1931), he accepted the post of director o...

Why Santiago Apostol is celebrated in Spain

Away from religious fervor and if we stop to study history as a science , turning away the ornaments and going back to the original events, data that can be verified through writings, prints, paintings, etc.If we turn to the popular tradition , we will realize that there is no worthy church in Spain, that it does not have a relic of some saint or the so manic clove of Christ, without forgetting the amount of splinters of the cross , scattered throughout the churches of a certain entity throughout the Christianity. Santiago el Mayor Legends , myths, miracles, that there is truth and lies .One of the stories perhaps less known despite everything, is the relationship between Santiago Apostol with Spain. Why a day is dedicated to this saint, becoming the Patron of Spain, what was his true story or what is real in it, let's reveal Why Santiago Apostol is celebrated in Spain. Article index Why Santiago Apostol is celebrated in Spain | Who was Santiago Apostol ...