Ignacio Pinazo

The work on paper by Pinazo is far less known than oil painting, but it can be said, without falling into ponderative excess, that only because of his aspect of draftsman, Pinazo is already one of the great artists of his time. The first sword in the history of Spanish drawing. His biographers have noted that Pinazo standed out as a skilled draftsman. After beginning his studies at the Escuela de San Carlos, he got the second prize in the class “drawing from life”. Drawing was one of the most common artistic practices that he developed with great effort during adolescence, in the free time he had after his work activities. His mastery of the pencil lies over the years in the field of pure virtuosity, a virtuosity without shows or ostentation, which allows him to advance or move in any academic or unquestionable modern direction. Pinazo’s relationship with drawing is the story of a passion and an obsession. For the artist, drawing becomes a mean of knowledge and analysis of the world around him. His drawings are not simply technical mechanisms to serve the realization of a plastic idea, but are works with entity in themselves. As clearly reveal the pieces in this exhibition, his drawing has an extraordinary autobiographical and chronicle value of the life in his time. Professional models and urban events are captured by his pencil with the same interest as the domestic scenes of his family environment. A succession of images, surprisingly varied, which form a vital and social glittering mosaic. The novelty of this exhibition is that it is the first to be devoted to a collection of drawings of extraordinary quality (mostly drawn double-sided) from private collections, which formed a closed set that can now be seen in all its dimension. Among the drawings there are sketches of such important works as Los últimos momentos del Rey Don Jaime, Las Hijas del Cid o El guardavías, and also a considerable number of studies of male and female nudity which show that Pinazo was a master of this genre. There are highly finished drawings with other more schematic; preparatory drawings of some of his most famous paintings along with drawings and fountain pen works conceived as authentic creations. At the exhibition Pinazo en Italia, organized by the IVAM and taken to Rome in 2008, the plastic production of his years as a pensioner was studied. The present exhibition, centered on a significant portion of the hundreds and thousands of drawings he made, continues revealing part of the production of one of his most evocative periods.  Pinazo made the first trip to Italy on his own between 1873 and 1874. As a pensioner of the Diputación de Valencia, he goes to Rome for the second time in 1876 with his wife Teresa Martínez. In Rome, was born in 1879, his firstborn José Pinazo Martínez. Teresa and José will be portrayed in drawings and oil sketches quite often. A series of drawings that can be seen now portray the domestic life of the painter in those years. Pinazo arrives to a newly unified Italy and to a Rome erected as the capital of the new State, seat of the court of Victor Manuel II, who died in 1878 when the painter was in the Italian capital. Historical facts that his pencil, as well as his brush, strive to reflect. As to the teacher M. Fortuny, nothing went unnoticed to Pinazo’s pencil, which drew with remarkable alacrity when the occasion demanded it. With the selection of over one hundred pieces of this wonderful collection, we penetrate into the intimate trails of creation of this drawing genius.