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

Johann Tobias Beck Biography

Johann Tobias Beck (Balingen, 1804-Tübingen, 1878) German Protestant theologian.Professor in Basel and preacher in Tübingen (1843), he opposed Baur's school a realistic inspiration more in line with the text of the Scriptures.
Post a Comment
Read more

Godfrey of Bouillon Biography

Godfrey de Bouillon Knight of the First Crusade, creator of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Baisy, Brabant, c.1061-Jerusalem, 1100).He was Duke of Lower Lorraine (Netherlands) and a faithful ally of the Emperor Henry IV, whom he had helped in his struggles against Rudolph of Swabia and against Pope Gregory VII.When Pope Urban II appealed to Christendom for a Crusade to liberate the "Holy Places" from the hands of Islam, Godfrey was one of the first to go (1095).He sold most of his domains to finance his own army, with which he arrived in Constantinople in 1096.He loaned vassal to the Byzantine emperor in exchange for food and troops.And, after his outstanding participation in several victorious battles against the Muslims (Nicaea, Dorilea, Antioch), he became head of the crusaders.These named him king of Jerusalem once the city was taken in 1099; but Godfrey did not admit the title, claiming Christian humility, and changed it to "protector of the Holy Sepulcher." He or...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jose Maria de Aguirre Biography

José María de Aguirre (Tolosa, 1896- id ., 1933) Spanish writer in the Basque language.Under the pseudonym Xabier de Lizardi , he wrote books of poems ( En el corazón y en los ojos , 1932), a play ( The boy who did not could marry ) and a volume of prose ( Plain Word , 1934).
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

Higuchi Ichiyo Biography

Higuchi Ichiyo (Higuchi Natsuko, Tokyo, 1872- id ., 1896) Japanese poet and novelist.He demonstrated his talent with Rivalry (1895-1896), a work that describes the miserable Tokyo of the suburbs; Also notable are Turbid Images (1895) and The Moon of the Thirteenth Night (1895).
Post a Comment
Read more

James Ramsay MacDonald Biography

James Ramsay MacDonald (Lossiemouth, Scotland, 1866-at sea, 1937) British politician who was Prime Minister between 1929 and 1935.Of humble origins, he joined the Independent Labor Party in 1894, of the one who would become president.In 1900 he participated in the formation of the Labor Representation Committee, an organization designed to ensure the presence in Parliament of an autonomous group that defended the reformist and egalitarian ideas of the trade union movement. Ramsay MacDonald In 1906 he was elected deputy in the midst of a great electoral success for his party, which changed its name to the Labor Party.He led the parliamentary group from 1911 to 1914, the year in which he did not get re-election due to his pacifist stance in the face of the imminent outbreak of the First World War.Re-elected in 1922 by a Welsh mining district, he became leader of the opposition. In 1924 he became Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of a brief minority government, from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gaudenzio ferrari Biography

Gaudenzio Ferrari (Valduggia, c .1480-Milan, 1546) Italian painter, sculptor and architect.He was inspired by Bramantino and collaborated with Rafael Sanzio in Rome.He worked in Saronno ( Concert of Angels , 1535) and in Vercelli. While in Florence the lessons of Leonardo da Vinci were assumed as an important trend, although no less than others, in Lombardy they had an exclusive and immediate repercussion, forming a true school focused on both the aesthetic content and the more technical aspects of the master's painting.Leonardo's teachings also reached the Piedmont region, where the painter and sculptor Gaudenzio Ferrari made, in the city of Varallo Sesia, large fresco cycles with scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, both in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and in the Sacro Monte chapel, some of them also made up of sculptures. Natividad (1511), by Gaudenzio Ferrari The art of Gaudenzio Ferrari fuses elements of diverse origin, both Peruginescos and Rafaele...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hevelius [Johannes Havelke] Biography

Hevelius [Johannes Havelke] (Danzig, 1611- id. , 1687) German astronomer.He drew up a first lunar map, published under the name Selenography (1647), in which he assigned names to the various features of the lunar surface and called the dark areas the sea.He determined the period of rotation of the Sun, observed its spots and discovered the faculae.In 1657 he began a catalog in which he determined the positions of 1,500 stars and that he could not finish because of a fire that destroyed his observatory (1679).
Post a Comment
Read more

István Széchenyi Biography

István Széchenyi (István Széchenyi, count of Sárvár, called The Great Magyar; Vienna, 1791-Döbling, 1860) Hungarian politician.Austrian army officer (1809-1815), as a deputy in the Diet, he advocated a series of reformist measures: abolition of serfdom and guilds, creation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1825), construction of the suspension bridge of Budapest, founding of a Danube steam navigation company, etc.A supporter of the link with Austria, he was Minister of Works and Communications in the first Batthyány Government.In his book El Crédito (1830) he set out his program of economic development.
Post a Comment
Read more