ESTEBAN VICENTE
Turégano (Spain), 1903 – New York,(USA) 2001  
Having moved to Madrid in 1904, as a child he visited the Museo del Prado with his father, an amateur painter. 
In 1921 he began at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he studied sculpture for three years before deciding on painting in 1924. During this period he established friendships with the poets of the Generation of ’27, and in 1928 he presented his first solo exhibition at the Ateneo. During the following years he moved from place to place, living in Paris (1928-30), Barcelona (1930-34), Ibiza (1935) and then Madrid (1936), before finally settling in New York the same year. The work he produced in that period, exhibited in the Salon des Surindépendants and at the Galeries Dalmau, consisted of everyday scenes of Barcelona and drawings and watercolours of his stay in Ibiza, which were presented in a solo exhibition at the Kleeman Galleries in 1937. In his following exhibitions, at Kleeman (1940) and Bonestell (1941), he presented figures, portraits and landscapes that had been done in France, Spain and the United States, respectively. His first abstract drawings and paintings inspired by Cubism were shown at the Ateneo in Puerto Rico, where he stayed from 1945 to 1946. In 1947 he established friendships with De Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Kline and Newman and subsequently participated in the exhibition Talent 1950 (Kootz Gallery, 1950), organised by Shapiro and Greenberg. In 1950 he taught at the University of Berkeley, where he began the practice of abstract, pictoricist collage, superimposing pieces of paper with soft edges that could be cut and establishing colour fields. In 1951 he took part in 9th Street, and from then on he was included in the group exhibitions of the New York School (Stable Annuals). He also presented solo exhibitions: Allan Frumkin (Chicago, 1953), Egan (1955), Rose Fried (1957) and André Emmerich (1959). During the fifties and sixties he consolidated his style, paintings based on arranging floating rectangles and patches of colour with undefined outlines to form chromatic harmonies and effects of great luminosity. In the seventies, after the emergence of Pop Art, he continued with this style and maintained the pace of exhibitions, which he alternated with teaching at various American universities. In about 1970 he began to use the airbrush to apply pigment over large areas, which led his colour fields to a more undefined vibration. His first return visit to Spain in 1985 marked the beginning of a revival of his work (Banco Exterior, 1987; MNCARS, 1998), which was followed by the creation of the Museo Esteban Vicente (Segovia, 1998).