Gifts

ANTON ZORAN MUSIC Anton Zoran Music was born in 1909 in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian territory and is Italy today. His first contacts with literature and art came about in Vienna, where he discovered the work of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and in Prague. In 1930 he enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb. When he finished his studies, he travelled to Madrid, attracted by Spanish painting, especially by El Greco and Goya. In 1936 he moved to Dalmatia, where he took part in his first group exhibitions. The start of World War II brought him back to his native city, where he remained until 1943, when he moved to Venice; there he showed his first works from the series Dalmatian Motifs and Venice. Under the accusation of having collaborated with the resistance, he was deported to Dachau concentration camp, where he managed to draw and keep concealed a hair-raising chronicle of the horrors he saw there, part of which he saved after liberation. Back in Venice, he painted his first Self-portraits, although without abandoning his figurative landscapes, now endowed with great luminosity, which he kept up in the paintings called Siennese Landscapes, painted in 1948. Three years later, Music moved to Paris. In the second half of the fifties, he intensified his graphic production, without giving up painting, and in the series Dalmatian Lands (1957), he made his first and only incursion into a terrain akin to abstraction. In 1970 he starts one of his most outstanding cycles, Nous ne sommes pas les derniers (We are not the last), where he recalls the human tragedy involved in deportation, war and violence. In the seventies, he started to paint landscapes once again (Rocky Landscapes, 1976) and Venetian scenes (Canale della Giudecca and Punta della Dogana in 1981 and Interiors of Cathedrals in 1984), before making his last great series whose protagonist is the human figure as a symbol of loneliness and meditation, except in the case of Città (1988). The works presented here date mostly from the eighties and the nineties, but summarize many of the features constant in Music’s painting since his early years. In the first place, his highly expressive representationalism with contained gestures and colouring. His figuration, which inthe nineties he oriented above all towards portraits and more especially self-portraits, is austere and marked by accents of painting and light that avoid the definition of details. A large space confines his contemplative figures in an existential vacuum that immobilizes them. This donation does not strive to present a historic view of Zoran Music’s work, but a specific sample of the creative force of this artist who portrays his own deterioration day after day, the permanent self-portrait drifting towards death, in a tradition inherited directly from Goya. In the words of Music himself: ‘All my painting is about the same subject: the deserted landscape that is life. A life burnt by the sun and swept by the wind’. His work, although it does not belong to any avant-garde trends, can be found in institutions like the MoMA in New York, the MNAM Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum in Basle, the national galleries of Rome and Vancouver or in collections like the Thyssen-Bornemisza. SALVADOR VICTORIA Rubielos de Mora (Terol), 1928 — Madrid, 1994 His family had to leave Valencia in the middle of the Civil War. From 1947 to 1952 he studied at San Carlos Fine Arts School, where he coincided with Genovés, Doro Balaguer, Salvador Montesa and Eusebio Sempere. A hint of the abstract and at times geometric character that characterizes him can be seen in his figurative works from this period. He geometrized forms and used an Expressionist palette. We can see at this time the circles, triangles and rectangles that would always be present afterwards in his work, but above all spheres and cool yellows, lime greens, mauves and even those difficult bright oranges. And the fact is that his initiation in abstract painting arose in his case by opposing form and colour to representation. He had to exploit as much as possible the recourses of these forms and colours that would have to fill the gap left by figuration at that crucial starting point. Salvador himself said: ‘I found my path with the plenitude of abstraction, renouncing the actual concrete image; when I broke away from all anecdotic references to achieve melodic painting. I experienced abstraction as a path to purity’. The first known abstract work by Victoria dates from this time and is signed in Madrid, and has echoes of the Neoplastic movement led by Mondrian. In 1956, he won a scholarship to Paris, where he met Marie Claire Decay Cartier, whom he married in 1958. His contact with the artistic avant-gardes of the moment, only known in Spain thanks to a few magazines, was vital to him. Here he saw at first hand postwar American Expressionism, Tachism, so much in fashion in Paris at that time and which had immediate influence on the so-called École de Paris by means of its gestural and matteric painting: Zao Wou-Ki, Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages, etc. In 1958 he met Egon Nicolaus (1928-1988), with whom he formed the Grupo Tempo, among other artists of different nationalities, and he was involved in several international exhibitions with this group. We must not forget the help Salvador Victoria got from Luis González Robles, then in charge of Spanish participation in foreign biennials, as he took him to the 1960, 1968 and 1972 editions of the Venice Biennial; the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1967 and the Alexandria Biennial in 1968, among many others; or from gallery owner Juana Mordó, with whom he later formed a professional bond that lasted until her death in 1984. From hisarrival in Paris in 1956 and until 1958, Victoria little by little shook off all geometric and constructivist references —in which he also used sand and burnt surfaces— and went from action painting to a more gestural informalism. His intelligent use of colour, which was also one of the features of all his work, was especially notable at this time, largely because of the risk and passion it involved. His evolution in the last five years in Paris before his return to Spain in 1965 can clearly be seen. His stroke becomes more contained and the number of colours used in each picture is limited to two or three, with variations in black and red, or in black, red and blue. The gestural aspect is reduced and gives way to apparent order on the surface of the work, where the presence of flat colours can be seen in the background. On settling in Madrid at the beginning of 1965, he felt the need to give a new orientation to his work by experimenting with the third dimension. Symmetry, order and measurement gradually took the place of the gestural aggressiveness he had brought with him from France. By means of these exercises in surpassing informalism, he tried to find a more personal new form of expression. He evolved towards a sort of spatialism, where pure forms arose out of the dialectic established between two- and three-dimensionality. From 1967 onwards, he devoted a lot of time to producing graphic work, with over a hundred works catalogued. Around 1971 he began to abandon all those elements in the form of folded volumes that he considered superfluous. Once he reached the threshold of his metaphysical stage and by somehow freeing himself of the rigour that geometric structures —be they strips, straight lines or triangles— imposed upon him, Salvador started to use circular forms almost exclusively. The works of his last years are a kind of compendium of all his knowledge. This is above all when we could talk about the emotional value of his painting and the sense of architecture in his pictures, where the light is a key element in the composition. The sphere as a symbol of the eternal, and the straight line, when it appears, are present in a broad gravitational field in which the vacuum is an apparent deception, strokes full of gestures —reminiscences of Paris— float among gentle brushstrokes of the utmost subtlety.