Esteban Vicente 2022 by Miles McEnery Gallery

ESTEBAN VICENTE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

ATMOSPHERIC!DISTURBANCES ! By Tom McGlynn

Esteban Vicente belonged to a generation of artists who were true believers in the salutary effects of abstract painting. As a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, he shared with colleagues such as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston a sense that the lyrical in abstract art has the potential to immediately address the heart, soul, and mind of the viewer. It’s a working idea that the candor of subjective sincerity might find a way to speak to the grandeur of objective truth. Each artist of that generation found their way toward such an ambitious goal through intense introspection and formal experimentation in the studio, which consequently revealed the exact nature of the artist’s individual temperament. Some cleaved broodily while others cleaved lyrically. Vicente’s lyricism was expressed via his masterful restraint in structural improvisation, as noted by Thomas Hess in his groundbreaking 1951 book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase: “[The artist] constantly approaches the easily decorative, Vicente’s sense of elegance is usually a restraining force. Forms acquire hardness and colors, location as the painter forgets le bon goût and a"acks the interior motions of figures that melt into landscapes.” This is a significant distinction from the ultimate format of Rothko’s and Barne" Newman’s paintings, which imbued composition with a deep questioning of psychological and sociological meaning via symbolically reductive schema. That more activist stance was wonderfully expressed in Ad Reinhardt’s infamous cartoon image of 1946 in which an abstract painting shouting, “What do you represent?” bowls over a skeptical viewer. Rather than engage in such pitched ba"les with existential angst, Vicente opted for the quieter truth of painting’s inbuilt structures that emerge when adequately coaxed by the artist’s close a"ention to color, form, and compositional structure.

Georges Braque, Barque sur la grève (marine noire), 1960 Oil on canvas, 19 5⁄8 x 28 3⁄4 inches, 50 x 73 cm Courtesy Helly Nahmad Gallery, GB04088, © Paris, ADAGP 2022

This last talent was described in Vicente’s New York Times obituary by the critic Roberta Smith as “an unerring sense of abstract composition that reflected his late-blooming grasp of Cubist structure.” Yet Vicente’s considerable capacity for color structuralism might be closer to that of Cubism’s forerunner, Paul Cézanne, who stated, “The outline and the colors are no longer distinct from each other. As you paint, you outline; the more the colors harmonize, the more the outline becomes precise. ... When the color is at its richest, the form has reached plenitude.” Although Cézanne stuck to representational models in figures, landscapes, and still life arrangements, his description of color forms emerging from such an intensely optical experience is quite apt when considering Vicente’s abstract structures, which achieve a chromatic plenitude unrestricted by representational motifs. While many of his contemporaries such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock labored past Picasso’s more biomorphic improvisations on Cubism to divine their own temperaments, Vicente undoubtedly seated Henri Matisse as a judge in his own trial by influence. The critic Clement Greenberg wrote that Matisse emerged as “the greatest master of the twentieth century and that lyrical chromatists such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard “could maintain a higher consistency of performance” than their Cubist contemporaries in later phases of their career critic’s approbation can certainly be similarly applied to Vicente’s steady exploration and refinement of his color form reveries, fine examples of which have been selected for this exhibition.

The works in this survey, all executed within the last decade of Vicente’s life, offer an encapsulated view of formal tropes that defined his broad career. Being later works, they retain an ultimate, yet not exactly final, authority, since the artist characteristically suggests with each of his canvases a jumping-off point for the next. The earliest work represented here, Yonder (1993), features a strong, dark orange, gravitational swath of paint toward the bo"om of the composition, which is stiffened against a dominant grey-green ground. It reads like a landscape and strikes a moody tone, not unlike Georges Braque’s late boaton-beachscapes, in which both motif and pale"e trend allegorically toward resignation and intimations of mortality. Vicente’s exception to such heavy going, however, is seen in a cube of bright cerulean blue careening across the center of the composition, enveloped by dynamic strokes of red orange. There’s a mischievous allure to such a seemingly improvisatory gesture, especially when it is set up against a primarily subdued ground. Yet the artist masterfully controls its potentially unstable influence via a proportional color calibration. In Alegria (1995), a similar tonal range is at work, except that the artist’s brushwork is larger and more aggressive, and the painting is organized in a vertical down-sweep of dark orange slashes against a lighter and less saturated violet ground. Its central focus revolves around a diminutive “sun” of deeper red orange, which lends the overall composition an organic reference of atmospheric disturbance. Here we see Vicente recapitulating earlier, formative themes in Abstract Expressionism such as those shown in Barne" Newman’s Genesis¬–The Break (1946) and Clyfford Still’s 1948 (1948), a move that also offers the viewer a window into the artist’s general tendency to retain such natural allusions in abstraction. In response to Jackson Pollock’s most famous declaration, “I am nature,” Vicente could be seen in this work to be saying, less obstreperously, “I paint as nature would be painted.” With Instinctive (1994), one sees the artist painting in a higher key, as the painting’s vibrant yellow-orange ground sets its smaller compositional elements in a zero-gravity orchestration. These elements are approximate rectangle and triangle shapes in subtle tonal and saturation shi's of orange and green, which seem to a"ract and then repel one another, as if they have been set spinning by alternating molecular charges. Vicente offsets and carefully modulates this spatial drama with incredibly delicate swathes of white and the lightest red orange, which se"le at the bo"om of the canvas. The painting is a perfect example of the dynamic contiguity of the formal “push and pull,” most famously espoused by Hans Hofmann.

Debussy’s impressionistic composition “La Mer.” Both artist and composer relate in their respective works the ultimate impossibility of training natural forces for aesthetic harness while nevertheless ambitiously proceeding to a"empt as much.

Clyfford Still, 1948, 1948, Oil on canvas 70 1⁄2 x 62 1⁄4 inches, 179.1 x 158.1 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY © Clyfford Still Estate

The older artist’s call-and-response approach is undeniably an archetypal presence in Vicente’s work, as it is in the work of one of Hofmann’s former students and studio assistants, Giorgio Cavallon, who, like Vicente, was a founding member of The Club. Both mounted and participated in the epoch-making “Ninth Street Show” of 1951. One of Vicente’s characteristic elaborations of the Hofmann-ian push-pull aesthetic is his careful framing of “pulling” ground colors of higher value but less intensity with “pushing” lines and bars of more saturated hues. His paintings, therefore, are generally less compacted with color forms, as Hoffman’s tended to be. They are, rather, lightly atomized, developing misty penumbras with interactive hues. With Untitled (1996), the artist achieves such by counterpoising a familiar light red-orange and yellow arrangement in masses of elegantly tactile brush strokes, dividing the compositional ground in equal proportions from bo"om to top. The haptic sense is exquisite in this work, as Vicente’s brush revels in the kind of incremental tonal transitions expressed in smoky hue transitions that are similar to the way in which Rothko delicately edged his stacked nimbi. That sophisticated touch is further extended via bio-geometric forms interposed in saturated greens and reds. These complimentary “figures” slip and slide across one’s field of vision in vertical and horizontal orientation to enclose the overall ephemeral presence of Vicente’s color orchestration, somewhat similar to the timbral and textural changes shaping Claude

A more symbolic strain in Vicente’s work is exemplified in Untitled #15 (1997), in which the artist centers a small, central red orange “figure” with a lighter red orange “halo” over a light violet swath, which defines the horizontal orientation of the canvas. An association can be made here with J.M.W. Turner’s swirling suns burning holes in the middle of his chromatically diffuse sunsets in blinding allegories: intuitions of the waning of British imperial glory. Yet Vicente doesn’t really share such a rhetorical agenda here. His is more a ma"er of an instance of natural satori, a glimpse of a particularly radiant flower, perhaps, amid a field in filtered sunlight. He famously tended an extensive garden in his Bridgehampton, New York, home and studio, so such a horticultural inspiration is more likely than not. But it’s the translation of a transformative moment of beauty into a painting that presents a challenge to any artist. Vicente achieved this with an approach to abstraction that approximates the symbolic but then recedes back into a luxury of phenomenal plenitude, the kind of complex-yet-direct sensory pleasure one derives from an Odilon Redon symbolist pastel, for instance. Similarly, in Color Luz (1999), we see Vicente reprising some of his earlier color formulations (he was nothing if not consistent in reformulating his established pale"e) and composing a light-hearted abstract-yet-mythical landscape, a conceptual cousin to Matisse’s fauvist confabulations such as Le bonheur de vivre (1905-6). Pink and red-orange monoliths dominate its background, leaning into one another mysteriously like ceremonial stones in a Celtic array. A green “rise” is pulled into the center of the painting by a vertical line leaning in counterpoise to the monoliths, with an interjecting cube of red completing the “scene.” Something undoubtably magical is going on here, and one can either perceive it through an anecdotal reading or via a purely abstract consideration without losing any of its incipient mystery. Vicente’s abiding contribution to his generation’s seismic shi' from The School of Paris to The New York School is one of a continually renewed belief in the power of abstraction to express the artist’s subjectivity in an objective register. The boldness of such a stance over the course of his long career has accrued the fond patina of the artist as romantic figure, as

Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905-06, Oil on canvas 69 1⁄2 x 94 3⁄4 inches, 176.5 x 240.7 cm, The Barnes Collection, Philadelphia, PA © 2022 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

all revolutionary movements eventually have. He outlived almost all of his contemporaries, so the point of generational anachronism must not have escaped him. It could be argued, however, that Vicente entered into the revolutionary debate of abstract painting in the 1950s with an already coalesced idea of how color, form, and composition have the capacity to historically transcend sociological periods and trends. He spent significant time in his early career working with representational models in still life and landscape mode. His dedication to direct observation during this period brought him to a place similar to Cézanne’s intense scrutiny of nature and transposition of it into a personal vision. This grounding in phenomenal form in nature surely guided Vicente’s subsequent development as a master of abstract form and set him up for creative longevity, as distinct from the evanescent gestures of many of his generation’s existential conceptions. Vicente’s abstract dramas were more outer directed. He had the stage management of a seasoned observer, which lent his ebullient improvisations their convincing mise en scène. To the end, he remained an a"entive pupil to what his paintings could teach. There’s a youthful, restless quality evident in the studious inventions of these late works. Perhaps the greatest lesson Vicente has le' for us is the idée fixe of constant painterly evolution.

Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in New York. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper-Hewi" National Design Museum, among others. He is an Editor at Large at The Brooklyn Rail since 2012.

Meditative, 1993 Oil on canvas 42 x 50 inches 106.7 x 127 cm

Instinctive, 1994 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

Four, 1996

Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Untitled, 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

NYC Landscape, 1997 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Untitled #14, 1997 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Untitled #15, 1997 Oil on canvas 42 x 32 inches 106.7 x 81.3 cm

Forma Color, 1998 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Untitled #5, 1998 Oil on canvas 42 x 52 inches 106.7 x 132.1 cm

Color Luz, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Ideal Forms, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Sin Titulo, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Untitled, 2000 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

CHRONOLOGY 1903 Esteban Vicente is born on January 20 in Turégano, Spain, in the region of Castile y Léon. He is the third of six children of Toribio Vicente Ruiz and So*a Pérez y Alvarez. His father, a Civil Guard officer, is also an amateur painter. 1904-1917 His father resigns from the Civil Guard to take up a post as a property administrator with the Banco de España in order to bring up his children in Madrid. Esteban studies at a Jesuit school. From the age of four, he accompanies his father on visits to the Prado Museum. 1918 Vicente enters the Military Academy but leaves a'er three months. He then enrolls in the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid at the age of fi'een. He studies sculpture there for three years.

1922-1928 Develops friendships with the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and members of Generation of 1927, an influential group of poets that included Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and Federico García Lorca. He also befriends the future film director Luis Buñuel, the writer and publisher Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and the painters Juan Bonafé, Francisco Bores, and Wladyslaw Jahl. He shares a studio on the Calle del Carmen with the American painter James Gilbert; their friendship continues until Gilbert’s death in the 1970s. He holds his first exhibition in 1928 with Bonafé at the Ateneo de Madrid. 1929 Goes to Paris. Lives in a hotel and later shares a studio with the painter Pedro Flores. Earns a living retouching photographs and working on stage sets at the Folies Bergère. Visits Picasso at his studio on the rue La Boétie and participates in the Salon des Surindépendants. Meets the young American Michael Sonnabend, who later becomes his art dealer in New York. Spends time in London, where he visits the painter Augustus Johns and members of his circle.

1930–1934 He moves to Barcelona and through his dealers, Joan Merli and Montse Isern, exhibits at the Galeries Syra. Returns to Paris (1930-31), thanks to a grant from the Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios for study abroad. Meets the Surrealist painter Max Ernst through an English friend, Darcy Japp. Again exhibits in the Salon des Surindépen- dants. Has one-man shows in Barcelona at Avinyó (1931), Syra (1931), Busquets (1934) and Catalònia (1934). Exhibits in Madrid in the salon of the Heraldo de Madrid (1934). 1935 In Barcelona, he marries Estelle Charney (Esther Cherniakofsky Harac), a young American studying at the Sorbonne. They spend a year on the island of Ibiza. 1936 Returns to Madrid in July at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Works at camouflage in the mountains near Madrid before leaving for America. Lives on Mine"a Lane, in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. 1937 His daughter Mercedes is born. Thanks to the painter and critic Walter Pach, he has his first solo show in New York at the Kleemann Gallery. At the request of Fernando de los Ríos, the Spanish ambassador to the United States for the Republic, he works at the consulate in Philadelphia until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. 1939 Returns to New York. Has his second individual exhibition at the Kleemann Gallery. 1941 Participates in a group show at the Pennsylvania Acade- my of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. 1942–1946 He becomes an American citizen in 1942 and lives at 70 Grove Street in New York City. Teaches Spanish at the Dalton School and works as an announcer for Voice of America during World War II. His daughter, Mercedes, dies

in 1943. Lives at 280 Hicks Street in Brooklyn and works in a studio at 43 Greenwich Street in Greenwich Village. He divorces Estelle Charney in 1945. He teaches painting at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan from 1945-1946. 1947-1948 Returns to New York. Lives and works at 138 Second Avenue. Forms friendships with the painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Barne" Newman, and the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess. He marries the literary critic and educator María Teresa Babín in 1948. 1949 Teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and begins to work in collage. 1950 Sets up a studio at 88 East 10th Street. His studio is on the same floor as de Kooning’s studio. Chosen by the critic Clement Greenberg and the art historian Meyer Shapiro for the show Talent 1950 at the Kootz Gallery in New York. Participates in the Annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Has a solo show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. Establishes lasting friendships with the painters Balcomb Greene, Aristodemos Kaldis, Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Ma"er and Ad Reinhardt, and the sculptors David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, Philip Pavia, and George Spaventa. 1951 Helps organize and participates in the historic 9th Street exhibition. Included in the seminal work on the New York School by Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. Works daily in his studio and receives visits from Philip Guston, Earl Kerkham, and Landes Leitin, as well as from the art collector Ben Heller. Chosen for the first group show of the New York School sent to France and Japan. Named director of summer courses at the Highfield Art School in Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod.

1953 Elaine de Kooning’s article “ Vicente Paints a Collage” is published in Art News. Vicente has one-man shows at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Teaches during the summer at Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, N.C. Other teachers include the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, the composers Stefan Wolpe and John Cage, and the dancer Merce Cunningham. Among his students is the painter Dorothea Rockburne. He exhibits in several collective shows throughout the United States. 1955 Has solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York, a gallery that also exhibits work by Giorgio Cavallon, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Kline, Reuben Nakian, and Jack Tworkov. Participates in several collective exhibitions. 1957 Has one-man show at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York. Accepts a teaching position at New York University, where he remains until 1964. Considered by Harold Rosenberg to be one of the “leaders in creating and disseminating a style...[that] constituted...the first art movement in the United States.” 1961 Divorces María Teresa Babín and marries Harriet Godfrey Peters. Lives in the Gramercy Park section of New York. 1962 Awarded a grant from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University. 1964 Founding member of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, together with Mercedes Ma"er, Charles Cajori, and George Spaventa. With his wife, Harriet, buys a Dutch colonial farmhouse in Bridgehampton, N. Y. Sets up a studio there and plants a flower garden.

1972 Josh Ashbery writes in Art News that Vicente is “widely known and admired as one of the best teachers of painting in America.” Moves to West 67th Street. Makes a second trip to Morocco. 1973 Teaches at Columbia University. 1975 He accompanies Harriet on a Jain pilgrimage to India. 1979 First solo show at the Gruenebaum Gallery in New York. 1982 Travels to Turkey with Harriet. 1983 Leaves his studio at 88 East 10th Street for a new one on West 42nd Street in the heart of the theater district.

1984 Receives an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the Parsons School of Design in New York.

1965 Artist-in-residence at Princeton University, where he has an individual show. Travels to Mexico. 1966 Travels to Morocco. 1967 The death of his friend Ad Reinhardt deeply affects him. 1969 He is artist-in-residence at Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. Selected to exhibit in The New American Paintings and Sculpture: The First Generation, curated by William Rubin at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1985 Receives the Saltus Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design of New York and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le"ers as “one of the most gi'ed painters of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists,” with “a sensibility trained in Europe with the express purpose of opening the eyes and ears of Americans to the peculiar beauty around them.” Travels to Spain. 1987 Has a major retrospective in Madrid at the Fundación Banco Exterior de España: Esteban Vicente, Pinturas y Collages, 1925-1985, and also exhibits at the Yares Gallery in Sco"sdale, Ariz. Continues teaching at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and maintains contact with students, artists, and friends of all ages.

1988 Receives the Childe Hassam-Eugene Speicher Purchase Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le"ers in New York. He exhibits at the Galería Theo in Madrid and is included in eight group shows, among them Aspects of Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object in Twentieth-Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 1989 Has a solo show of recent oil paintings and collages at the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. 1990 Has two one-man shows in Spain. Participates in the exhibition, Drawing Highlights: Eric Fischl, Roy Lichtenstein, Esteban Vicente, at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N. Y. 1991 Receives the Gold Medal in Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos and Queen So,a at the Prado Museum. Has a street named a'er him in Turégano, his hometown, in honor of his distinguished career as an artist. Teaches master classes at the Parsons School of Design and has six individual showings, including one at the Centro de Exposiciones y Congesos in Zaragoza, Spain, and another at the Galerie Lina Davidov in Paris. 1992 Travels to Spain to a"end the opening of a solo show at the Palacio Lozoya in Segovia. Has three one-man shows in the United States: at the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York, the Louis Newman Galleries in Beverly Hills, Calif., and the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, N. Y. A selection of his work is chosen for the show Paths to Discovery: The New York School, at the Baruch College Gallery in New York. He continues to teach master classes at the New York Studio School and the Parsons School of Design. 1993 Elected a member of the American Academy and Institute

of Arts and Le"ers at the age of ninety and awarded an honorary doctorate in ne arts from Long Island University, Southampton College. Receives a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton. 1994 His most recent works are shown at the Century Association of New York. Celebrates his ninety-first birthday with an exhibition of his latest works at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the company of past and present students. Travels to Spain to visit family members, among them, his sister María, and a"ends the opening of his one-man show at the Galería Elvira González in Madrid. Five Decades of Painting opens at the Riva Yares Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. 1995 There is a major retrospective of his collages at the IVAM, Centre Julio González, in Valencia, Spain. Hudson Hills Press publishes the monograph Esteban Vicente by Elizabeth Frank. Vicente has exhibitions of recent works at the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco"sdale and the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. The Glenn Horowitz Gallery in East Hampton shows a selection of small collages and unique divertimentos. 1996 The exhibition Esteban Vicente, Collages 1950-1994 travels from Valencia, Spain, to the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marque"e University, Milwaukee. Vicente has solo shows of recent works at the Riva Yares Gallery in Santa Fe and the Galería Elvira González. He returns to Spain with Harriet for a family visit. In the fall, he moves his studio to 1 West 67th Street, next door to his apartment. He abandons the use of the spray gun. 1997 He paints twenty works in three months in his new studio. Receives visits from friends William Maxwell and Susan Crile, among others. His longtime friend Willem de Kooning dies. Writes an article in de Kooning’s honor in the ABC

(Madrid). Holds exhibitions at The Century Association in New York City, the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco"sdale, and Berry- Hill Galleries in New York. Restoration work is begun on the future Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, sponsored by the Diputación Provincial de Segovia. The board of trustees of the museum is created, and the painter and his wife make a formal donation of 148 works.

1998 The retrospective Esteban Vicente, Obras de 1950-1998 opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So,a in Madrid. The exhibition later travels to Santiago de Compostela (Auditorio de Galicia), Valladolid (Museo de la Pasión and Monasterio de Nuestra Señora del Prado) and Palma de Mallorca (Fundación Pilar I Joan Miró and Casal Solleric). He receives the Premio Castilla-León de las Artes. He a"ends the opening of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, where a permanent collection of his artwork offers a broad view of his entire career. He continues supervising his students’ work at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, where he began teaching in 1964. 1999 At the age of 96, he continues painting every day. Travels to Spain with his wife, Harriet, where they are awarded the Gran Cruz de la Orden Civil de Alfonso X el Sabio for their contribution to art. Vicente is also named “Segoviano del Año” and awarded the Premio Arcale by the city of Salamanca. Has a one-man show at the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco"sdale. A permanent room devoted to his works opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So,a. All these honors, together with his participation in several exhibitions, mark the culmination of his recognition as an important gure in twentieth-century Spanish art. 2000 Spends the winter in Bridgehampton rather than New York City for the first time. Does several drawings and sketches. Has one-man shows of drawings and collages at the Galería Elvira González and the Berry-Hill Galleries. The magazine Reviewny devotes its Lifetime Achievement Award issue (July) to Esteban Vicente. In November, a retrospective

exhibition, Esteban Vicente Esencial, is held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente. 2001 On January 10, the artist dies at his home in Bridgehampton, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. Complying with his wishes, his ashes are buried in the garden of his museum in Segovia. His death coincides with the homage that was planned for him earlier by the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, of which he was a founding member and teacher for thirty-six years. The book A Mis Soledades Voy, consisting of famous Spanish poems illustrated with engravings by Esteban Vicente, is exhibited. The book, which he had worked on until shortly before his death, is also shown at an exhibit in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente with the title El Color Es la Luz: Esteban Vicente 1999-2000. Included in the catalog are his writings on art. The show later travels to the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, Spain, and the Monastery of Nuestra Señora del Prado in Valladolid, Spain. A retrospective of his work is held at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, N. Y. , in September. That same month, an exhibition devoted to various aspects of his work opens at the Monastery of Silos in Burgos, Spain, a space that regularly shows an important selection of major contemporary Spanish art.

SELECT COLLECTIONS

Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Academy Museum and School, New York, NY

Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA

Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase, NY

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, M A

Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, HI Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Newark Museum, Newark, NJ

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ

Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX

Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, N Y

Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA

Broad Art Center, University of California, Los Angeles, CA

Institut Valenciá d’Art Moderne, Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N Y

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le"ers, New York, NY

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, Spain Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Museo Colecciones del Instituto de Crédito Oficial, Madrid, Spain

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Carl Van Vechten Museum, Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, NY

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So,a, Madrid, Spain

Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ

Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Spain

University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Detroit Intitute of Arts, Detroit, MI Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ESTEBAN!VICENTE 28 July – 26 August 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2022 Tom McGlynn Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Digital Initiatives Associate Sean Kennedy, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Dan Bradica, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-86-1 Cover: Meditative, (detail), 1993