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).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Egon Eiermann Biography

Egon Eiermann (Neuendorf, 1904-Baden-Baden, 1970) German architect.He was a disciple of H.Poelzig and was influenced by Mies van der Rohe.He brought the rationalist tradition to the utmost technological and functional refinement (Blumberg handkerchief factory, Merkur department store in Stuttgart).
Post a Comment
Read more

Elijah Querejeta Biography

Elías Querejeta (Elías Querejeta Gárate; Hernani, 1930-Madrid, 2013) Spanish film producer.He studied chemistry and law, while at the same time he was part of the Real Sociedad de San Sebastián football team, a career he abandoned at the age of 24.He was a regular at the screenings held by the city's film clubs, where he met other young people-Víctor Erice, Antonio Eceiza-who would study at the Official Film School of Madrid. Elías Querejeta In 1961 he founded his first company, Laponia Films, at the same time that he collaborated with other production companies on his first films.After directing several short films, in 1964 he decided to found Elías Querejeta P.C.From his first films, he defined the style he wanted to print in his works, intervening in almost all of them as co-screenwriter, while gathering around him a group of professionals who would guarantee the finish of each film (Luis Cuadrado and Teo Escamilla as directors photography; Primitivo Álvaro, in the produc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hugo Wast Biography

Hugo Wast (Córdoba, 1883-Buenos Aires, 1962) Pseudonym of the Argentine novelist Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, one of the most discussed Argentine writers of the 20th century.Of some of his novels, such as Flor de durazno (1911), taken to the big screen in what was Carlos Gardel's acting debut, more than one hundred thousand copies were sold, and many of them translations have been made in up to eight languages; however, the criticism is generally negative: some historians of Spanish-American literature go so far as to dispense with his name; others even affirm that their work lacks literary value. Hugo Wast, one of the most widely read Spanish-speaking writers in the world, became a lawyer at the Universidad del Litoral (Santa Fe), was a professor of Economics at said University and directed the National Library, in Buenos Aires, from 1931 to 1955.Deputy to the Cortes (1916-1920) and Minister of Justice and Public Education (1943-1944), he obtained in 1922 the gold medal of the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Guillermo Cabrera Infante Biography

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Gibara, Cuba, 1929) Cuban writer, nationalized British.In 1951 he founded the Cuban Cinematheque, of which he was director until General Batista ordered its closure, a work that he combined with his articles on film criticism for the magazine Carteles, which he published under the pseudonym G.Caín (1954-1960).He also directed the literary magazine Monday of Revolution, banned in 1961 by Castro.In 1966 he published his first renowned novel, Tres tristes tigres, whose experimental nature lies in the ingenious use of language in its most colloquial register and the constant play of winks and references to other literary works.He was a diplomat in Brussels, until he definitively broke with the Castro regime and settled in London.He has written other outstanding novels, such as Vista delmanecer en el tropico (1974), Exorcismos de esti (l) o (1976) and essays such as Vidas para leerlas (1998).In 1998 he received the Cervantes Prize.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Holy Alliance and the Congress of Vienna

It is time to go a little deeper into the Holy Alliance and the Congress of Vienna .Want to know what were the objectives of the Vienna Congress of 1815? What is the Holy Alliance? What were the most important points of the Congress of Vienna? What are the countries that make up the Holy Alliance? What were the most relevant points of the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance? Well, if you want to discover all this, do not miss all this information in About History.Coge pencil and paper that we started already. Article index What is the Holy Alliance? Many of you will be wondering what the Holy Alliance is, for what goes the explanation.In September 1815, after the end of the Vienna Congress, the Holy Alliance meant the signing of a pact through the initiative of the Russian Tsar Alexander I, Francisco I of Austria and Frederick William III of Prussia.The Vienna Congress took place in the Austrian capital and said international meeting was held after the defeat of Napoleon ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Heinrich Gentz Biography

Heinrich Gentz ​​ (Wroclaw, 1766-Berlin, 1811) German architect.He is one of the best exponents of the first German classicism.He looked for the relationship between the façade and the character of the buildings and between the internal layout and the use to which they were intended.
Post a Comment
Read more

Space, change and permanence ... elements to understand history

In some of our latest articles we have analyzed different aspects of knowledge construction historical .In the latter post we have to reflect on the historical categories of " space ", " change " and " permanence " and its importance to sharpen our understanding of the history . Old Map of Colonia del Sacramento , disputed by Portuguese and Spanish for its strategic location in the Rio de la Plata As we know the History studies human societies in the past .Y of course, these societies lived in a territory ( space ) in particular, so whenever we start studying a society of the past we must place it in space and time. The space is a very important aspect e to study the History. Each territory has its own characteristics that can be decisive for understanding many aspects of a society .For example: what economic production does it do, trade routes, the distribution of the population, the strategies in wars, etc.In addition, soc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hugo Eckener Biography

Hugo Eckener (Flensburg, 1868-Friedrichshafen, 1954) German aeronaut, one of the promoters of the famous zeppelins of the interwar era.Eckener carried out his aeronautics studies at three German universities: Munich, Berlin and Leipzig. Hugo Eckener After finishing his degree, he joined the Zeppelin factory, where he would develop rigid airplanes, as well as the lightest airplane in the world for fly around the earth.During World War I, Eckener dedicated himself to teaching German war pilots, while directing the construction of 88 zeppelins for German aviation. After the war, Eckener took over the reins of Ferdinand von Zeppelin's factory, when he died in 1918, and he became president of it in 1924.In that time interval he devoted himself mainly to popularizing business travel.In that same year he directed the ZR-3 flight between the German city of Friedrichshafen (Berlin) to the North American city of Lakehurst (New Jersey).This airship was built for the United States as ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The human evolution: hominization process

The DNA of human beings only differs from the DNA of chimpanzees by 1.24%.That is, we share 98.76% of our genetic traits.The great difference between chimpanzees and humans that this small percentage, is explained through the human evolution and the main processes of hominization that our species has suffered throughout what we know as prehistory, when our ancestors They were hunters and gatherers: the skeletal changes associated with the upright position, the increase in cranial capacity and the birth of immature offspring. Article index Human evolution: hominization process The study of human evolution begins in 1859 with the publication of "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin , where he exposes his Evo Theory lucion, based on three fundamental premises: Different species have their origin in the evolution of a previous species. This evolution is governed by the principle of Natural Selection .Only those species that best adapt to the changes evolve. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Giambattista Castello Biography

Giambattista Castello (Called the Bergamasco; Gandino, c .1509-Madrid, 1569) Italian architect and painter.He made the main palaces of Genoa (Cataldi, Podestà, Doria).In 1567 he was appointed architect and painter to the court of Felipe II.He built the monumental staircase of El Escorial and designed the Álvaro de Bazán palace in El Viso del Marqués.
Post a Comment
Read more