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).