Antonio Saura
Crucifixión (Crucifixion), 1959
Oil on canvas, 131 x 163 cm

Antonio Saura (Huesca, Spain, 1930 – Cuenca, Spain, 1998) was a significant figure in the history of art in Spain in the 20th century. He was a founding member of the group El Paso (1957–1960), along with the artists Manolo Millares, Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Antonio Suárez and the writers and critics José Ayllón and Manuel Conde. His approach to plastic arts, aesthetics and politics transcended the period during which his work represented the modernisation, renewal and internationalisation of Spanish art. A staunch opponent of the Franco regime, in the years following Spain’s transition to democracy, he pointed out the political exploitation of the arrival of Picasso’s Guernica in Spain in 1981.
A resident of Paris since 1954, his work appeared in large-scale domestic and international artistic events from 1957 onwards, both individually and with El Paso. Examples are the group’s foundational exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery and the exhibition Arte Otro, curated by Michel Tapié at Sala Negra, both taking place in Madrid in 1957; the 24th Venice Biennale competition (1958); the second Documenta art show in Kassel (1959) and, the same year, the exhibitions of El Paso at the Biosca Gallery in Madrid and the Joan Gaspar Gallery in Barcelona, coinciding with the publication of a special issue of the magazine Papeles de Son Armadans (Papers of Son Armadans) on the group. In 1960, he received the Guggenheim award and exhibited the following year at the New York gallery of Pierre Matisse. This resulted in the recognition of his approach to plastic arts and his aesthetic affinity to informalist painting and American Abstract Expressionism. Saura shared with his contemporaries the intention of rethinking the world through a new way of extending the artistic practice. They no longer defended an art of mimesis but one of maximum expression, feeling and ethical value. To some extent, this meant being aware of the possibilities of abstract art and its eminent gestural value. However, Saura’s work does not illustrate the assumption of the principle of tabula rasa that was so common among the works of many artists at that time. While he never ceased to use figurative or iconic references, the pictorial tradition in Spain – its subject matters but also its aesthetics – was among the principal motifs he would use to develop his work.
In Saura’s work, we see a group of series and themes in which that was organised, looking beyond the chronological factor. Such series are Constelaciones (Constellations), Fenómenos (Phenomena), Obras surrealistas (Surrealist Works), Grattages, Damas (Ladies), Desnudos (Nudes), Sudarios (Shrouds), El perro de Goya (Goya’s Dog), Retratos imaginarios (Imaginary Portraits), Multitudes, Acumulaciones (Accumulations), Mutaciones (Mutations), Superposiciones (Superimpositions) and Crucifixiones (Crucifixions). Furthermore, he did not limit himself to the pictorial medium but was the author of an abundance of texts, critical writings, aphorisms and reflections on the practice and the role of the artist.
The work Crucifixión (Crucifixion) is part of an eponymous series that Antonio Saura began in 1957 and prolonged over the course of his career. In technical and aesthetic terms, the plastic characteristics of the author’s informalism are evident in this work: the violent gesturality that attains graphological qualities, the reduced colour palette (white, black, grey, ochre) or the frontality of the figure, which evidences rejection of all illusions of space or depth. Hence, the gesture and the furious application of material in each brushstroke are materialised and revealed on the canvas surface. This Crucifixion exemplifies, in the artist’s words "the torture of forms, the degradation of structures of reality and the appearance of dynamics of morsura (sic) and corrosion that constitute a fight with the support it holds and with the image that comes apart and consolidates within its own organic conflict". In this transposition of values from ethical to plastic, the resulting work is the struggle of a dismembered and hypersexualised body (the insistence on phallic forms); a morphological trauma signed and consented through that handprint, in prehistoric fashion.
On the one hand, there are numerous references to Goya and Picasso in Saura’s work and writing, as well as his memories of the Prado Museum and his vision of Cristo crucificado (Christ Crucified, approximately 1632) by Velázquez. Saura’s work with painting, especially this painting, was his attempt at preventing the Franco regime from taking over the principles of Spanish culture and tradition in the form of themes or iconography such as that of the crucifixion, an awareness that also interested Picasso in the 1940s and 1950s. Hence, Saura undertook a process of secularisation and updating of traditional iconography, taking a stand against the art sanctioned by the dictatorship while identifying himself within the tradition of an art of crisis (moral, aesthetic).

References
Jacques Terrasa, "Les citations monstrueuses dans l’oeuvre d’Antonio Saura", Cahiers d’études romanes, no. 5, 2001, pp. 151–165.
Antonio Saura. Crucifixions / Crucifixiones, Ediciones del Umbral, Madrid, 2002.
Lo nunca visto: de la pintura informalista al fotolibro de postguerra (1945–1965), Fundación Juan March / Editorial de Arte y Ciencia, Madrid, 2016.
R. Robles Tardío