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

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer Biography

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Gustavo Adolfo Domínguez Bastida; Seville, 1836-Madrid, 1870) Spanish poet.Along with Rosalía de Castro, he is the highest representative of post-romantic poetry, a trend that had as distinctive features the intimate theme and an apparent expressive simplicity, far from the vehemence rhetoric of romanticism. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (detail of a portrait made by his brother Valeriano, c.1862) Bécquer's work exerted a strong He influenced later figures such as Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and the poets of the generation of '27, and critics judge him to be the initiator of contemporary Spanish poetry.But more than a great name in literary history, Bécquer is above all a living poet, popular in every sense of the word, whose verses, with a moving voice and winged beauty, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the predilection of millions of readers.. Biography Son and brother of painters, he was orphaned at the age of ten and live...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gerardo Rueda Biography

Gerardo Rueda (Madrid, 1926- id. , 1996) Spanish painter and one of the most prominent members of abstract art in our country.For his pictorial constructions he used a wide range of materials (cardboard, wood, cloth, etc.), with which he sought to create a game of radical contrasts of textures; As for color, he sometimes adopted monochrome ( Azul , 1972).He participated in the Hispano-American Biennial of Havana (1953) and in the Venice Biennial (1960).In 1963 he founded with F.Zóbel the Museum of Abstract Art of Cuenca.His works include Blanco, Rojo y Negro (1975), Alea (1978) and the stained glass windows of Cuenca Cathedral (1991).In 1989 he donated part of his graphic work to the National Library.
Post a Comment
Read more

Jose Risueño Biography

José Risueño (Granada, 1665- id ., 1732) Spanish sculptor and painter.Follower of A.Cano, P.de Mena and D.de Mora, he worked in Granada, where he made the figures of the chapel of the Sacrament of the Carthusian monastery, the San Juan de Dios of the church of San Matías and the Crucified Christ of Sacromonte.It is famous for its polychrome baked clay figurines ( Penitent Magdalene ).
Post a Comment
Read more

Jan Hus Biography

Jan Hus (Also called John or John Huss; Husinec, Bohemia, 1369-Constance, 1415) Promoter of the Czech ecclesiastical reform.He was born into a poor peasant family in southwestern Bohemia.However, he managed to study Theology and Arts at the University of Prague and ordained himself a priest (1400).In 1402 he was appointed rector of the University, supported by the Czech particularist sentiment against Germanic domination. Jan Hus Under the influence of the English heretic John Wycliffe, Hus began in 1405 to preach against the excessive wealth of the Church and the immorality of the clergy, demanding a return to the purity of the evangelical message, preaching in the Czech language that the people could understand, and communion under both species.Its influence was increased by the crisis in which the Church of Rome was plunged by the "Schism of the West", as well as by the Czech nationalist reaction against the German minority (started with the struggle for control of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Joseph Boussinesq Biography

Joseph Boussinesq (Saint-André-de-Sangonis, 1842-Paris, 1929) French mathematician.He also studied physics and was a professor of different disciplines in Paris.A member of the Academy of Sciences, his work covered very diverse fields of physics, mathematics and philosophy.His statistical studies on hydrodynamics are especially interesting.His works include Infinitesimal Analysis Course and Analytical Theory of Heat.
Post a Comment
Read more

Joseph H. Maclagan Wedderburn Biography

Joseph H.Maclagan Wedderburn (Forfar, 1882-Princeton, 1948) British mathematician.Professor at Princeton University, he was editor of the Proceedings of the Edinburgh mathematical society (1905-1909) and the Annals of mathematics (1912-1928).He stated a theorem ( Wedderburn's theorem ) according to which every finite field is commutative.
Post a Comment
Read more

Jose Raúl Capablanca Biography

José Raúl Capablanca (Havana, 1888-New York, 1942) Cuban chess player who was world champion from 1921 to 1927.José Raúl Capablanca learned to play chess at the age of four, observing his father's technique.In 1902, when he was only fourteen years old, he participated in the first Cuban national chess championship, qualifying in fourth position. José Raúl Capablanca From then on he took part in various competitions that led him to tour Europe and the United States.Between 1912 and 1915 he published a chess magazine in Havana.During the First World War he stayed in New York, where he won several chess tournaments between 1915 and 1918. He won the world chess championship in 1921, after defeating Emanuel Lasker in Havana.In that same year he published his work Fundamentos del ajedrez and married in the Cuban capital.Capablanca continued to compete and won, among other tournaments, the New York International in 1927.This year he lost his world title to Russian Alexander Ale...
Post a Comment
Read more

Joseph-Clément Juggler Biography

Joseph-Clément Juglar (Paris, 1819- id ., 1905).French economist and physician.He was a forerunner of the theories that explain business cycles and movements of expansion and contraction of economic activity.It established the existence of cycles of seven to eight years (Juglar cycles) that periodically affect the economy and whose movement can be statistically predicted and observed.He published The commercial crises and their periodic reappearance in France, England and the United States (1862).
Post a Comment
Read more

Heinrich maier Biography

Heinrich Maier (Heidenheim, 1867-Berlin, 1933) German philosopher.He produced a "critical realism", along the lines of H.Driesch.He is the author, among other works, of Aristotle's syllogistics (1896-1900) and of The philosophy of reality (1926-1935).
Post a Comment
Read more

Elio Donato Biography

Elio Donato (4th century AD) Latin grammarian.Preceptor of Saint Jerome, he wrote some Commentaries to the works of Terence and Virgil and a grammar considered one of the most complete works of its kind in Antiquity. Donato (right) with Terence and his commentators The famous grammarian Elio Donato was considered the" grammaticus urbis Romae "par excellence.Together with the rhetorician Victorino, through severe studies he tutored a whole generation of diligent disciples; Among them was Saint Jerome himself, who repeatedly quotes Elio Donato with the reverent title of "praeceptor meus", speaks of his unusual doctrine and places it at its peak in the year 353.His work must be understood as that of a master that he wrote for his school. From Donato we keep an Ars grammatica in two versions, both due to the same author: a "minor", of a catechetical nature, for initiates or "infants" and referring to the eight parts of speech; and anothe...
Post a Comment
Read more