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

Gregorio López Raimundo Biography

Gregorio López Raimundo (Tauste, 1914) Spanish politician.In 1936 he joined the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC).He fought in the civil war and then went into exile in Mexico.Back in Spain, he participated in the general strike in Barcelona (1951), for which he was imprisoned.Secretary general (1955-1978) and president (1978-1981 and 1982-1985) of the PSUC, he was elected deputy to Congress in 1977, 1979 and 1982.He has published Writings.Fifty years of action, 1937-1988 (1989), collection of political texts, and his memoirs, First clandestinity (1993).
Post a Comment
Read more

Francesco Robortello Biography

Francesco Robortello (Udine, 1516-Padua, 1567) Italian philologist.He was a teacher of eloquence at various Italian universities (Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna).His main works are: De historica facultate (1548), De vita et victu populi Romani sub imperatoribus Caesaribus Augustis (1559) and his editions of the Poetics of Aristotle (1548).
Post a Comment
Read more

James Wilkinson Biography

James Wilkinson (Calvert County, 1757-Mexico, 1825) American politician and adventurer.He participated in the American War of Independence and in the Kentucky separatist movement (1787) as a double agent for Spain.He was named Governor of Louisiana in 1805 and Commander of New Orleans in 1813.
Post a Comment
Read more

Armando Discépolo Biography

Armando Discépolo (Buenos Aires, 1887- id ., 1971) Argentine playwright.His work abounds in festive themes and reideros that were very successful at the time ( The continuous movement , 1916; El chuco Pintos , 1917).Also noteworthy are his sainetes with dramatic touches, which make up what is known as grotesque criollo ( Mateo , 1923; Stéfano , 1928; Clockmaker , 1934).
Post a Comment
Read more

Emilio Castelar Biography

Emilio Castelar (Emilio Castelar Ripoll; Cádiz, 1832-San Pedro del Pinatar, Murcia, 1899) Spanish politician, last president of the First Republic.Editor of El Tribuno (1854), La Soberanía Nacional (1855) and La Discusión (1856-64) and professor of History at the University from Madrid since 1858, his frank opposition to the government of Queen Elizabeth II, manifested through the anti-dynastic newspaper he founded and directed in 1864, La Democracia , cost him the chair.In 1865 he was sentenced to death, but managed to flee abroad and remained in Paris until the revolution of 1868.Returning home, he became head of the republican party opposed to Generals Serrano and Prim, who sought to establish the constitutional monarchy and the Duke Amadeo I of Savoy, who held the throne of Spain for three years.Minister of Foreign Affairs after his abdication, president of the Cortes and then of the Republic in 1873, his influence gradually diminished and he left power the following year...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jorge Rojas Biography

Jorge Rojas (Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Boyacá, 1911-Bogotá, 1995) Colombian poet who was the animator and editor of the notebooks of Piedra y Cielo , which gave name to the poetic group founded by him.He was the first director of the Colombian Institute of Culture (Colcultura), and a member of the Colombian Academy of Language. In his first collection of poems, The form of his flight (1939) The influence of some contemporary Spanish poets, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pedro Salinas, is clear.The influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez was prolonged in the volume The submerged city (1939), the first of a collection of poetic notebooks promoted by Rojas that took the name of a book by Juan Ramón ( Piedra y cielo , 1918) and around which the poetic group Piedra y Cielo was formed, in which young poets such as Tomás Vargas, Darío Samper, Arturo Camacho, Gerardo Valencia, Eduardo Carranza and Carlos Martín participated. Jorge Rojas The aesthetics of Jorge Rojas and his fellow "Pi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hayato Ikeda Biography

Hayato Ikeda (Hiroshima, 1899-Tokyo, 1965) Japanese politician.Prime Minister of Japan from June 1960 to October 1964, he was one of the main architects of Japan's spectacular economic recovery after the end of World War II.He has come to be known as the father of the Japanese economic miracle. He was born into a wealthy merchant family in the city of Hiroshima.In 1925 he obtained degrees in Law and Economics from the Imperial University of Tokyo.That same year he obtained a civil servant position in the Tax Office of the Prefectures in the Ministry of Finance.Until the end of World War II he had a life as a bureaucrat in the Japanese administration.Little by little he rose to the post of Vice Minister of Finance in 1947. Hayato Ikeda After the end of the Second World War, he began his career politics in the ranks of the Liberal-Democratic Party (Minshu Jiguto).In the January 1949 elections he was elected representative of the Hiroshima prefecture in the Diet.He held the T...
Post a Comment
Read more

Heinrich Brüning Biography

Heinrich Brüning (Münster, 1885-Norwich, 1970) German politician, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the final phase of the so-called Weimar Republic, presided over by Paul Hindenburg.A conservative in ideology and a practicing Catholic, Brüning also served as Foreign Minister from October 1932, shortly before Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany.As a specialist in financial affairs, his greatest achievement was to reduce to minimal amounts the war reparations that the Allies had imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).Unable to solve the country's serious economic problems, he was driven to practice a clearly right-wing policy that allowed him to govern with more or less dictatorial procedures, bypassing the Reichstag itself, which did not prevent him from being a convinced democrat. Heinrich Brüning Heinrich Brüning studied philosophy, history and political science at three different universities.After having made a series of study trips to Fran...
Post a Comment
Read more

John Millington Synge Biography

John Millington Synge (Rathfarnham, Ireland, 1871-Dublin, 1909) Irish playwright, a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the early 20th century.Born into a Protestant family, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.He studied music in Germany and later went to Paris, where he lived poorly for some years; During this period, he became interested in the novelists of French naturalism, prepared essays on literary criticism, and composed elegantly crafted poems, characterized by accents of deep tenderness. John Millington Synge In Paris he met WB Yeats, his compatriot poet who led him to return to Ireland and be inspired by the lives of the poor peasants and fishermen of his land.In the Aran Islands, the western outpost of Irish territory eternally beaten by rain and wind, a Catholic colony had lived there since Cromwell's time to avoid persecution.The difficulty of relations with civilization, the hard work necessary to obtain the scarce resources from the ocean an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary oldman Biography

Gary Oldman (Leonard Gary Oldman; London, 1958) British actor.Born into a humble family, he studied Drama Art on a scholarship at Rose Brudford Drama College until 1979.He then joined the Greenwich Young People's Theater group and appeared in numerous plays in the early 1980s.He had his greatest success with The pope's wedding , which earned him the Best Actor award from the British Theater Association in 1985. He began working in film in supporting roles.His portrayal of the punk singer Sid Vicious, leader of the legendary rock group Sex Pistols who died of heroin overdose, in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), made him known internationally.In this role some of the constants of his acting career were already present: giving life to a character at the limit for whose characterization he had to physically transform, in this case lose weight. Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy (1986) In Open your ears ( 1987), by Stephen Frears, delighted the viewer in one of his mos...
Post a Comment
Read more