Antonio López - Master of Spanish realism by uitgeverijdekunst

Antonio López Master of Spanish realism

4 Harry Tupan

Foreword 6 Harry Tupan

A conversation with Antonio López 10

Contents

Albert Mercadé

Antonio López: The Throbbing of Reality 28 Floor van Heuvel

Crafted Beauty The Realism of Spain and the Netherlands 56 Violant Porcel

Antonio López: The Essence of the Everyday 98 Toine Moerbeek

The dream of a light 140

Biography 142

About the authors Image credits

Foreword

There are rare moments in life when you instantly fall in love with a work of art. This happened to me when I first saw Mujer en la bañera (1968) [≥ p. 47] by Spanish realist Antonio López García (b. 1936, Tomelloso). It was years ago, at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair. I knew López’s work from a 1985 catalogue of the Europalia culture festival, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels. The European exhibition featured a major retrospective of his work, under the heading of Spanish realism. I now stood face to face with the painting for the first time. An incredible experience. It reminded me of other famous bathing scenes in art history, like the iconic, neoclassical The Death of Marat of 1793 by Jacques-Louis David. Less than a century later Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard and others would paint many famous bathing scenes. López builds on this tradition, recording an intimate moment. It is entirely in line with his series of paintings featuring various items in his bathroom and other rooms in his home: a wash handbasin, a toilet, a refrigerator. Situations in his immediate surroundings, which he loves to draw on. López is also well known for his very large paintings of urban scenes. He sometimes spends decades on such a painting, always working at a certain time of year, returning to the same spot each time in precisely the same period. This results in extremely detailed images that demonstrate López’s technical skill. The Drents Museum has invested a great deal of time in bringing López’s work to Assen. We sent several letters and emails to Madrid, and the plan finally began to come together when I travelled to

the Spanish capital with Dutch artist Sam Drukker to visit López at his studio. Drukker had drawn him during a previous encounter [≥ p. 29], and so it came that, on a warm summer’s day, the artist welcomed us to his home, in the company of his daughter María. We had a wonderful conversation, and the absolute highlight of the visit was the chance to see his master piece La Cena (1971-1980) [≥ p. 107]. This extraordinary family portrait also appears on the cover of this book. During my next visit, María suggested we contact Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera, also known as Casa Milà, in Barcelona. They were also keen to organise a museum exhibition of López’s work, to be shown first in Barcelona, at Antoni Gaudí’s world-famous building. And so it came to pass: a fantastic collabora tion between our institutions, and an exhibition that was shown first at La Pedrera from 22 September 2023 to 14 January 2024. Well-known museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2008) and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (2011) had previously shown López’s work, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. And now the Drents Museum is showcasing ‘master of Spanish realism’. As has been noted before, our museum has specialised in figurative art for decades. The focus of our purchasing and exhibitions policy is the Noordelijke Realisten (Northern Realists) and the Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School). Now, for the first time, we are showing the work of an exponent of Spanish realism. I am certain that the work of Antonio López, be it his drawings, paintings or sculptures, will leave an indelible impression on visitors to the exhibition.

Antonio López works on Hombre y mujer [Man and woman] in his studio with in the background Mujer en la bañera [Woman in bath], 1969

Thank you to the Drents Museum team, who worked on the exhibition with unflagging enthusiasm. I would also like to thank our publisher Waanders Publishing in Zwolle for enabling us once again to produce such a wonderful publication. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Rolf Toxopeus for the outstanding design, and to the authors who contributed to this book: Albert Mercadé, Violant Porcel, Toine Moerbeek and Floor van Heuvel. I am also grateful to Sam Drukker, who accompanied me on my first visit to López. A warm gracias to our colleagues at La Pedrera, Marta Mansanet, Marta Lacambra and Germán Ramon-Cortés, who assisted with such generosity and selflessness. The same also goes for the team at studio López: María López and Beatriz Hidalgo. Finally, I would like to thank those who provided work on loan, and our sponsors and benefactors, without whom this exhibition would never have been possible.

Last but not least, thanks to Antonio López for the wonderful conversations and, above all, this fantastic exhibition and catalogue. I hope our visitors will enjoy his extraordinary work! Harry Tupan General director Drents Museum

Harry Tupan

Spanish painting is meticulous and precise painting, but it is not detailed painting. antonio lópez

A conversation with Antonio López harry tupan: Antonio, you were born in the small Spanish village of Tomelloso. What was it like growing up there? antonio lópez: Tomelloso is between Madrid and Andalusia. The climate there is severe: the winters are cold and in the summer it’s very hot. But I had a very happy childhood there.

Were you still a child then, or did you have to grow up fast? I was a child, but a very smart child. I understood everything that was going on around me. I had lots of people around me, like my classmates. They were all older than me and they protected me.

There was a very important figure in your childhood: your uncle, Antonio López Torres, who was also an artist. How were you influenced by him? He had a lot of influence on me. He determined the course of my life. I started making art at an early age, and at the age of thirteen I was able to go to Madrid to study painting. That was all down to my uncle [≥ fig. 1].

And so there you are in Madrid, as a very young art student. What or who were your most important sources of inspiration? I knew nothing and no one, but I wanted to learn everything. I had a talent for drawing, but no training. There was no art school or art museum in Tomelloso. But in Madrid, you had the Museo del Prado, where I would often go. My fellow students were older and knew more than me. I learned everything from them.

To Madrid at the age of thirteen... How did you survive that? I saw Madrid as a kind of salvation, I was happy there. In Tomelloso I was educated to do an administrative job in a factory. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to stay in the countryside, but my father didn’t want me to work there. He had a different future in mind for me. It was at that point that I started painting. My uncle persuaded my father to send me to Madrid. Where did you live? They took me to a guesthouse in the city centre, close to the places where I would study and practice. My uncle accompanied me on my first visit to Madrid. He took me to the guesthouse, said where I had to go and draw to improve my skills, and found a ‘school of fine arts and crafts’ where I could draw in the evenings. Once everything was arranged, he left, and I was alone at the guesthouse. But I was happy. 6

Your career started with your talent for drawing, but you soon started making paintings and sculptures. Was that always an obvious combination for you, those three disciplines? I have always been interested in the different disciplines, from the moment I was preparing for the art academy entrance exam, for the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. I had to draw a Greek statue to be admitted. I had to copy it from a metre away. I spent the entire year studying and drawing statues. I loved it, it was wonderful to do that.

Drawing, painting and sculpture – is that a trinity for you? Or is there one discipline you like a little more than the others? Painting, I really love that. But drawing is also fantastic, not everyone can do it. Anyone can paint, but not everyone can draw. Drawing is a way of communicating for me. The language of drawing is fluid and natural. Simple, but at the same time so complex. You don’t find much drawing in Spanish art history, there’s much more in the art of France and Germany. Little attention was paid to drawing in Spain. It’s viewed here as a transition to painting, a kind of practice for the ‘real’ work. So there are not many Spanish drawings of intrinsic value. Almost all of them have been lost. We know that Diego Velázquez drew [≥ fig. 2], but barely a single one of his drawings has survived. You met some like-minded people at the Escuela de San Fernando, a group that soon came to be known as the ‘Madrid Realists’. Could you tell us something about that? That’s right. When I arrived in Madrid I was completely alone, but I got to know people at the Escuela. I met my wife María Moreno there, after I’d been in Madrid about five years. She was still in her first year at the Escuela. María was friends with a very good artist, Isabel Quintanilla. We often dined together.

That group, was it mainly a bunch of friends, or a ‘real’ group of artists? At first we were mainly friends. It wasn’t until 1970 that our work was shown together at an exhibition. That was in Frankfurt, at Hanna Bekker vom Rath’s gallery. After that our work was shown in London, at the Marlborough Gallery in 1973. It was there, shall we say, that the realisation came that there was a group of artists working in Madrid who had an association with each other. From then on, several more group exhibitions were organised. It is sometimes said that you were the ‘pillar’ of the group. What’s your view? That’s not how I felt at the time. Things like that just happen. People always want to point to someone as the figurehead of a particular group. Like the person who made the biggest progress in their art, but I don’t think that was me. I was young, though, and that made people curious.

1 Antonio López next to the first drawing he sold, early 1950’s 2 Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Cabeza de muchacha [Head of a girl], 1620 Black chalk on paper, 20 ∞ 13 cm Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid) 3 The ‘Madrid Realists’ in Rome, to the left with striped shirt is Antonio López, 1972

You grew up at the time when the autocrat Francisco Franco was in power in Spain. What was that like for you? Did it have an impact on your life or your art? I don’t know. We were at an age when we wanted to discover the world [≥ fig. 3]. Love, art, it was all new to us. We weren’t interested in Franco. And if you look at the art we were making at the time, you can see that. It wasn’t dark or gloomy art. But the art you were making was different from the art that Franco championed – abstract art. Franco wasn’t interested in art. But at a certain point his government decided that abstract art gave Spain a kind of image of modernity. They used art to give the impression that Spain was not lagging behind. Franco painted himself, by the way, but not very well. At that time, it was a problem that artists in Spain didn’t know international art. They didn’t know what was going on in Paris, Italy, Germany and the

4 Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), The enigma of a day, 1914 Oil on canvas, 185 ∞ 140 cm The Museum of Modern Art (New York) 5 Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) The love letter, 1669-1670 Oil on canvas, 44 ∞ 39 cm, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 6 Jan van Eyck (circa 1390-1441) Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 Oil on panel, 82 ∞ 60 cm National Gallery (London)

United States. It was difficult to find out what developments were taking place. We only got to see work by Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico [≥ fig. 4] occasionally in Spain. You had to be highly curious and very lucky to know what was going on beyond Spain’s borders. This was not only the case with abstract art, by the way, but figurative art too. We didn’t know Balthus, Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth, for example. Nothing reached us, we had no idea it existed. Speaking of well-known artists, when I visited you in your studio in Madrid I saw a number of books about Dutch seventeenth-century painting. Where did your interest in that come from? When I arrived in Madrid, ancient art was the first thing I got to know. There was a museum in Madrid with very good plaster replicas, known as Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas. There I encountered all the Greek, Roman and Renaissance art. A whole world opened up for me, I could see this ancient art thanks to the reproductions. That made a big impression on me. I also visited the Prado, where they had Dutch and German art. And my friends sometimes showed me postcards. That’s how I got to know Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. Three great artists who really made me want to know more. But because I didn’t travel much, I didn’t know their entire body of work. There were books, but not many. I went to the library at the Escuela every day and studied them. That’s how I got to know Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse as well. If we look at your artistic development, is it correct to say that your art evolved from surrealism to realism? I have had two great loves that taught me a lot, and influenced me a great deal. One was ancient art, the other modern art. When I first encountered modern art as a student, it was mainly the work of the surrealists, like Salvador Dalí and De Chirico. Surrealism taught me to look at the world differently. I learned to understand the world.

You are known to work mathematically, with lots of instruments like compasses and rulers. Why do you approach your work in this way? Is it your way of getting a grip on reality? Yes. I think that every painter, sculptor and poet has their own point of departure. They work with a language that encompasses something they regard as essential. In my field, I see precision as fundamental. To see the size of this, the distance from here to there [gestures], from the pencil to your hand or elbow or head… Depicting all that with precision is essential for me. I think that Vermeer looked at the world in a similar way. How he positioned the chair, the rug, the stool, how he captured reality. It’s very precise, almost geometrical [≥ fig. 5]. As in the work of Piet Mondriaan. The perspective in reality really impresses me, I find it magical. The world is chaos and I have this urge to impart some structure to it. I try to bring that structure to my work, otherwise I feel like I’m in freefall. Precision like that takes time. Sometimes you work on a piece for more than ten years. You once said, ‘A painting is never really finished.’ That implies that you could go on painting forever. Could you reflect on that? Alberto Giacometti once wrote a book in which he observed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a work of art would be made in accordance with a classical process. There was a particular way of finishing a piece, which many artists adhered to. But from the nineteenth century the boundary between what was finished and what was not became blurred. That boundary has now been lost.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that. After all, there’s a big difference between the way a painting by the Van Eyck brothers was finished and a work by Francis Bacon. The Van Eyck brothers knew when they were commissioned to produce a painting what it would eventually look like, as in the Arnolfini Portrait [≥ fig. 6]. In this piece, it is very clear that Van Eyck knew when he had to finish. But when we paint, and I mean the painters of our time, we don’t know what the endpoint will be. It depends on lots of actors. Whether your model remains cooperative, for example – whether it be a person or a flower. But I do regard most of my work as ‘finished’ at a certain point. When everything comes together and the work doesn’t make me tired, I can keep going until I’m satisfied. To the point I envisaged. You can’t do any more, it’s just finished.

You have lots of fans, Antonio. What do you regard as the high points of your career? There are several. I remember when my work was first shown in a gallery in Madrid in 1960. I was young and alone, just graduated, and life wasn’t easy. That was really special. The exhibition in New York, too, expanding into other countries, that was really important to me. That happened in 1965. A gallery owner in New York had seen my work in Madrid and invited me to exhibit in the United States. María’s companionship was important to me throughout my career. I don’t know what would have become of me without her [≥ fig. 8]. I’m not good at being alone, it has a very bad effect on me. Maybe that’s why I often work with models I’m close to. I’ve been doing that since my first work from the 1950s. Like in La cena.

7 Antonio López, Terraza de Lucio [Terrace of Lucio], 1961-1992 Oil on panel, 172 ∞ 207 cm Private collection 8 María Moreno and Antonio López paint together on the streets of Madrid, 1978

What strikes me is that your compositions often appear to be skilfully constructed. You often use a repoussoir,1 for example. Why is that? The answer is very simple: because it was there! Where I stand when I paint determines how the painting will eventually look [≥ fig. 7]. That is the basic rule of all my work.

1 An object in the foreground of a painting, drawing the eye to the most important element of the work, and enhancing the illusion of depth. .

Albert Mercadé

Antonio López: The Throbbing of Reality

Humankind’s true homeland is childhood. r ainer maria rilke DE BIRTH OF AN ARTIST Antonio López has a particular way of looking at reality, a way that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries. The artist does not denounce reality. He does not question it. Nor does he subvert it. He simply makes it visible in all its palpitating plenitude. This is an unusual approach for an artist who was born in 1936 and grew up in Spain in the years after the Spanish Civil War. Most of the biographies of his contemporaries contain stories of tragic childhood experiences, the seed of their future rebellious gaze. Not so in the case of López: every memory of his childhood in the village where he was born, Tomelloso, is happy. Each recollection of reality is filled with life. He was the first grandchild born into a large family with many branches and, in his memory, harmony reigned between the villagers, farmers, children, grandparents and animals. As he describes it, his childhood was practically a golden age and, in consequence, if we heed the line by Rainer Maria Rilke that serves as an epigraph to this essay, the only conclusion to be drawn is that López’s rich oeuvre is rooted in his joyful childhood in Tomelloso.

Descended from farmers and landowners, López grew up in the home of his mother’s family, surrounded by his (grand)parents, cousins, uncles and aunts and all kinds of country folk. His recollections are of men and women of enormous vitality, modest but with a practical and positive view of life. The other side of the coin was his father’s family: sombre characters touched by the tragedy of war. Even so, it was in his father’s home where the shoots that would feed his developing sensibility were to be found: the phantasmagorical, books and objects. But above all, there was a source from which everything would emerge: Antonio López Torres. This uncle, on his father’s side, was known as a great painter from the La Mancha region.1 He was seen as one of Spain’s most important naturalist masters of the interwar years. Antonio López’ first drawing and painting done with artistic intent ( Jarra y pan and Bodegón con jarra y pan [≥ fig. 2], both from 1949) came about thanks to his uncle, who, after a period of careful watchfulness, noted his nephew’s talent as a magnificent copyist of prints and illustrations in old books. López Torres was the first to suggest that he should draw from life in a basic exercise with a table and still life, a challenge our young artist met with skill though he was barely thirteen years of age. 1 A sparsely populated Spanish region south of Madrid. Traditionally an important agricultural region.

1 Antonio López works on Autorretrato de bebé [Self-portrait as baby] in his studio, 2020

2 Antonio López Bodegón con jarra y pan [Still life with jug and bread], 1949 Oil on canvas on panel, 40.7 ∞ 49 cm Collection artist

That exercise proved useful, as it satisfied his family with regard to his future. Thanks to his uncle’s mediation, he would not be going into accounting or farming but instead become an artist, and for that he would have to train at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. All that was needed was one final test to establish that incipient vocation: the entrance exam to the school. At just fourteen years of age and after ten months of preparation, Antonio López passed with flying colours. The years López spent studying art at the school are essential to under standing his early personal works produced between enrolling at the school, in 1950, and his first solo show, held in 1957 at the Ateneo de Madrid. In essence, during this period of training, he acquired two major bodies of learning that would remain with him during his determined exploration of the real world: classical art and avant-garde figuration. In classical art, López found a vital aesthetic point of reference that pointed him towards his as yet undecided artistic personality. In the Museo de Reproducciones at the Casón del Buen Retiro2, a new horizon of beauty opened up before him that perhaps evoked for him that wondrous childhood in Tomelloso which now, in his solitude in Madrid, resounded with him. It was a pristine and true world without error and which included Phidias, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Assyrian reliefs and Egyptian statuary. At the Casón, he gained not only the rudiments of his artistic training. He also found a safe path for representing a reality that, at just over fifteen years old, he already longed to capture. A few years later,

he would expand his knowledge of classical art during two trips to Italy and Greece in the company of his classmate, the sculptor Francisco López. The great lesson of those travels, was his discovery of the naturalness and simplicity that emanated from Roman painting, which he had never viewed first hand. Classical painting was not rigid and idealised; it was natural and elemental. Life breathed in the murals and in their simple evocation of sexuality, life, death and natural landscapes. The artworks were framed in villas with light wells and familiar depictions that reminded him, two thousand years later, of his childhood home in Tomelloso. Alongside López’s learning about classical art, avant-garde painting also exerted an early influence on him while he was at the Escuela. This was no simple matter: the avant-garde prior to the war (Cubism and Surrealism) had been fragmented by the Spanish Civil War and its expression was reduced to a minimum during the Franco dictatorship. Every finding related

2 The collection of this nowclosed museum in Madrid consisted of reproductions of sculptures from antiquity and the Renaissance. Especially during the time when Spain was relatively cut off from the outside world (under Franco), this museum was a valuable source of art historical information.

to it called for slow and almost heroic exploration by the young artists of the postwar years: involving discoveries in bookshops or contributions by a number of their teachers trapped in the isolation and exclusion of pro-Republican intellectuals and artists termed ‘internal exile’ in Spain. In this scenario, López initially found a connection with the Cubism of Picasso, undoubtedly due to his innate interest in the spatial conception of reality, that later revealed itself in both his sculptural and his pictorial practice. He then came to Surrealism in its most fantastical form, which he identified in figures such as Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico. López was captivated by Chagall’s narrative fabulation, which helped him in his early years to enhance the expression of his portrayals of the real world, among them El Campo del Moro (1960) [≥ fig. 3]. He was seduced by De Chirico’s mysterious and metaphysical gaze, which reminded him of the classical world. Later on, López also developed an interest in the trends in Spain in the postwar years that sought to renew Surrealism, as exemplified by Antoni Tàpies in his early days – whom López discovered at the First Spanish-American Art Biennial in 1951. But López did not pursue the explorations of dreams further, as his interest already lay in tangible reality rather than unfathomable dreamworlds. Thanks to these classical and avant-garde references, themes began to emerge that would later form the iconographic core of López’s painting of his mature years. In the background of Niño con tirador (1953) [≥ p. 109] there is already a slight urban vision of Tomelloso visible, but it is painted with a gaze still

highly influenced in its luminosity by the work of his uncle and, formally, by a spatial expression perhaps indebted to Pablo Picasso. A number of still lifes painted in Tomelloso are also indebted to Picasso in his Cubist years, among them Mesa cerca de Tomelloso (1959) [≥ fig. 4], with synthetic and rustic elements in the foreground and the landscape of La Mancha with buildings in the Cubist manner as a backdrop. The urban landscape also appears in the backgrounds of interior scenes such as El balcón (1954) and Cabeza griega y vestido azul (1958) [≥ p. 78], works that introduce a new theme, the window, which would later occupy a central place in the artist’s pictorial oeuvre. As Francisco Calvo Serraller has pointed out, ‘the window has played a crucial role as an icono graphic gravitational axis among the realists from Madrid’.3 It served as an intimist space for the liberation and exploration of the outer world that was much appreciated in the years of the dictatorship, when Spain was isolated.

3 Antonio López El Campo del Moro [The Campo del Moro], 1960 Oil on canvas Private collection

3 Francisco Calvo Serraller, ‘Ventanas’, in Realistas de Madrid, Madrid: Museo Thyssen (2016).

4 Antonio López Mesa cerca de Tomelloso [Table near Tomelloso], 1959 Oil on canvas, 97 ∞ 130 cm Private collection

5 Giotto (circa 1267-1337) The lamentation of Christ, circa 1305 Fresco, 200 ∞ 185 cm Cappella degli Scrovegni (Padua) 6 Antonio López Sinforoso y Josefa [Sinforso and Josefa], 1955 Oil on canvas, 62 ∞ 88 cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid)

BEING IN A BODY López is clearly inspired by the art of Pompeii. Perhaps, he could even have lived in one of Pompeii’s urban villas with an atrium, small alcoves and family portraits in the vestibule. There he would have been surrounded by his people and his sole occupation would be painting murals of scenes of everyday family life. His trip to Italy in 1956 gave him the confidence he needed to pursue an artistic path based on things he had seen rather than imagined, but not far removed from the throbbing of real experience. Roman painting was like this, but so was pre-Renaissance Italian painting, as exemplified by the frescos of Orcagna, Andrea Mantegna and Giotto [≥ fig. 5]. Relatable, simple painting without forms of trickery that appeared in modern Western painting after the invention of perspective. Italy reaffirmed López’ belief in eternal and living painting. It made him realize that he needed to resist the seductive influences of the second wave of the Spanish avant-garde, which began to blossom in 1956 on the art scene at home and abroad. These were the years, let us not forget, of the rise of Informalism. 4 The winds of change of the new painting – abstract, informal, internationalist – were to redirect the paths followed by many artists of the postwar generation, but not that of López or many of his fellow students. They continued on the course of figurative renewal in the context of Spanish contemporary art. Why change direction when you have found your way? To go where? To join what?

In those same years that abstract artists were reaching their first milestones, López immersed himself in a period of transforming his pictorial work. Starting out from his core obsessions – everyday life and the city – he embarked on a path of making his work simpler and more natural. It would lead him in a few short years to create works that are the pinnacle of Spanish contemporary figuration. In the late fifties of the previous century, the painter had found his world. He had identified his referents, but he was still holding out against stripping it bare and isolating it completely, presenting it in a straightforward manner in the pictorial foreground, without the crutches of Surrealism, Cubism or academic painting that he had resorted to so frequently in his early days. Two events in his life proved extremely helpful in the consolidation of this new artistic period: his first solo show at a leading gallery (Antonio López García, Galería Biosca, 1961) and his marriage to María Moreno, also known as Mari, and their first family home on Calle Embajadores. There, he painted Mari en Embajadores (1962) [≥ p. 113]. The exhibition in 1961 at the Galería Biosca, the leading space for the new Spanish avant-garde run by Juana Mordó, was an unexpected commercial success that gave the artist confidence and independence. Moreover, his marriage gave López the serenity in his everyday private life that he needed to become the architect of a new domestic grammar within the framework of Spanish pictorial realism.

4 An art form (1945-1960) where the primary focus is placed on the painting itself. The painting process is spontaneous and experimental.

7 Antonio López Antonio y Mari [Antonio and Mari], 1967-1968 Polychrome wood, 55 ∞ 47 ∞ 28 cm (man) and 51 ∞ 45 ∞ 28 cm (woman) Loan from Städtische Kunstsammlung Darmstadt to Hessisches Landes museum Darmstadt 8 Antonio López Mujer de Almanzora [Woman of Almanzora], 2019 Marble, 8 ∞ 8.3 ∞ 5.2 m Museo Ibáñez & Centro Pérez Siquier (Olula del Río)

9 Antonio López Mujer de Coslada [Woman of Coslada], 2010 Bronze, 5.6 m (height) Plaza de la Hispanidad (Madrid)

Thus it was that in the early sixties López set about eliminating the extraneous from his art, taking as his sole model the intimate and everyday reality around him. Whereas in the fifties his sisters, uncles, aunts and grandparents had been his favourite subjects (Sinforoso y Josefa, 1955) [≥ fig. 6], now it was his wife and his daughters, María and Carmen, too. His portraits of Mari (Mari, 1961) and of himself with her (Mari y Antonio, 1961, altered in 2011), and his later sculpture Antonio y Mari (1967-1968) [≥ fig. 7] reveal a time when he was purifying and affirming his style, for which he had already just begun to lay the groundwork in portraits in the fifties, among them Cuatro mujeres (1957) [≥ p. 30-31], though he now applied it with greater conviction. Narratives, ornaments and details are gone and the painter’s chosen theme appears unadorned and directly. We could almost even add that he takes on a metaphysical approach5 , though López’s painting would be unlikely to go beyond physics: the process of synthesis in his art does not annul his subject’s personality. As he had learned from Pompeii portraits, it is precisely the expression of human reality alone, but in its entirety, presented in the foreground that gives the breath of life that engenders living art. A comparison of two portraits of the artist and his wife reveals this process of purging to reach frugal perfection very well: Los novios (1955) [≥ p. 34] and Mari y Antonio (1961) [≥ p. 39]. 16

Using the same pictorial approach, López succeeds in Mari (1961) [≥ p. 33] in capturing his wife’s sophisticated and austere, delicate and modest, grand and serene personality that he admired. In short: her character, in keeping with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s description of Roman art when it moved him for the first time. She was also the subject of the first freestanding sculpture the artist made (Busto de Mari, 1961–1962) [≥ p. 32]. In the context of this emancipation of his artistic work, López allowed not only those themes he was most passionate about to emerge, but also the techniques and disciplines he held most dear, among them sculpture. Even though he had specialised in painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, he also attended some classes that provided an introduction to sculpture, which proved useful to him. It should be remembered, as well, that López took his first steps in painting by admiring and reproducing the statuary of ancient times, which he regarded as the most beautiful and central to the history of art. Ever since the time of his studies, he has remained convinced that painting cannot encompass the entire reality he wishes to portray. But sculpture, as it has a more physical nature, can help to express human existence in a more corporeal manner.

5 Metaphysics literally means beyond (=meta) the empirically observable reality (=physics).

The portrayal of the human body in sculpture was to become a genre that López has returned to repeatedly over the course of his artistic career. In the early sixties, he extended his exploration to encompass the whole body in portraits of his daughter. Like in María de pie (2015-2020) and María de 9 años (1972) [≥ p. 43]. López embarked on a new area of work based on evoking the pure and innocent forms of childhood, a subject that returned to the fore on the birth of his grandchildren (Andrés corriendo, 2004, Andrés andando [2004] [≥ p. 67], Carmen dormida [2008] [≥ p. 68] and Carmen despierta [2008] [≥ p. 69]) . In the late sixties, López turned his sculptural interest to bodies outside his family, seeking to create a body of work less personal to him and more universal. The sculptural group Hombre y Mujer (1968–1994) [≥ p. 40-41], which he worked on for more than twentyfive years, attests to the new sculptural quest the artist was pursuing. The sculptures are both human and ideal: they provide the archetypal body of antiquity that López had admired, but with real presence. But how to reconcile classical idealistic sculpture with the new realism that he had embraced as a modern painter? A solution was put forward by the Roman philosopher Cicero: the artist cannot achieve human beauty by pursuing an abstract ideal. Instead one can create a composite harmonious whole consisting of various parts of real beauty. Cicero argued this theory in his story of the painter Zeuxis of Heraclea, who wished to portray the goddess Hera of Crotone and so brought together the five most beautiful local women and reproduced the graceful

aspects of each of their bodies. Cicero’s tale applies to López’s working method for his group Hombre y Mujer. For the man, he used different parts of human bodies that he admired: the anatomical body is that of a gardener at Torres Blancas, while the forehead is that his friend the painter Enrique Gran. For the female figure, he employed as many as five models, choosing the most appropriate parts of their bodies. All this with the added difficulty of having to modify the sculpture in response to the inevitable physiological changes his models underwent during the more than twenty-five years that it took him to create the piece. As we shall see, López works on both human sculpture and the urban landscape in the same way: he updates the physical image and likeness of his chosen motif as it alters in accordance with the passing of time. López has recently been able to scale up his sculptural work in his studio to large proportions thanks to numerous commissions for urban settings. His public work has prompted him to imbue his sculpture with a more symbolic bearing. In Mujer de Coslada (2010) [≥ fig. 9], installed in Coslada (autonomous region in Madrid), and Mujer de Almanzora (2019) [≥ fig. 8], in Almanzora (Almería), the sculptor revives some of the traits of his early sculptural work. In the works he tries to attain the essence of his subject, while being done in a primitive tone. But he also endows them with an inspirational character by making the figures’ faces look upwards to the sky while keeping the bodies firmly rooted to the ground. In contrast, in El día and La noche (2008) he explores the boundaries of time, while simultaneously

dwelling on the children’s faces, an expression of purity and vitality with which our artist perhaps recalls that golden age of his childhood in Tomelloso. An everlasting image of hope, innocence and freedom. PHANTASMAGORIAS OF HOME The uncanny constitutes the condition and limit of the beautiful. eugenio trías

One of the defining traits of any artist’s mature years is their boldness in presenting their most private obsessions in an unvarnished manner, free of the superficial interference of learned languages. One of López’s most cherished obsessions was the mysterious and phantasmagorical domestic interiors he had absorbed in his father’s family home during his childhood in Tomelloso. Books, furniture, gramo phones, cupboards and more were piled up in the alcoves of a shadowy, old house, darkened by the war and stained with ghostly images of the past. This domestic gaze at the interior world can already be seen in some of the polychrome low-reliefs López worked on from the late fifties onwards, among them Mujer durmiendo (1960-1961) [≥ p. 36-37], and especially in his easel paintings from the early sixties. La alacena (1962) [≥ p. 96] reveals his interest in old objects in a process in which doubts about his new pared-down work still persist, as demonstrated by the inclusion of his wife Mari in the background.

His various bathroom paintings between 1967 and 1972, including El cuarto de baño (1966) [≥ p. 60], Lavabo y espejo (1967) [≥ p. 61] and Taza de váter y ventana (1968) [≥ fig. 10], painted at his new family home, represent another step forwards. He is no longer identifying the domestic with the phantasmagorical, but is instead placing in the foreground the force of reality as it is, without being restrained by the representation of the old or visited by family ghosts. This is the domestic impression without any embellishment: with the old and the new, the run-of-the-mill and the luxurious, the polished and the indecorous. His bathroom portraits are one of the finest series in the history of Spanish contemporary figuration, and this is because of the lack of embarrassment in the representation of corners that normally lie hidden in our everyday environment. In his process of approaching and describing the real, López has gone beyond the representation of the beauty of the objective world. He puts the uncanny side of experience, as the philosopher Eugenio Trías would note, on hold. A reality grasped in all its existential feeling from a probing and modern perspective: essential, disturbing and direct. And in some instances with an almost cinematographic gaze in its focus too, as exemplified by Mujer en la bañera (1968) [≥ p. 47], which seems close to the suspense of Hitchcock’s famous shower scene. In López’s drawings on the same theme, among them Interior del baño (1969) [≥ fig. 11], the artist pushes the degree of identification with reality to the limit, painfully

10 Antonio López Taza de váter y ventana [Toilet and window], 1968-1971 Oil on paper, 142 ∞ 94 cm Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson (Madrid) 11 Antonio López Interior del baño [Interior of the bathroom], 1969 Pencil on paper on panel, 33 ∞ 48 cm Private collection 12 Antonio López Conejo desollado [Skinned rabbit], 1972 Oil on board, 53 ∞ 60 cm Private collection (Madrid) 13 Antonio López Nevera nueva [New fridge], 1991-1994 Oil on canvas, 244 ∞ 183 cm Private collection

merging with the surroundings of his life that were a feature of his artistic journey. Something similar happens to us with Conejo desollado (1972) [≥ fig. 12]. Its naturalness is terrifying, but at the same time it contains an accuracy that distances it from the tradition of still lifes of flayed animals, earlier examples of which are to be found in universal painting, among them works by Rembrandt. We find the same clear naturalness in his later works, among them Nevera nueva (1991–1994) [≥ fig. 13], which are clearly different from his early works of the sixties. The fridge he painted in 1966 [≥ p. 95], for example, is an ordinary icebox that we can admire for its metaphysical solitude, yet it looks old and obsolete in comparison with that of 1991–1994. In Nevera nueva, López presents us with a new object, depicted in all its gleaming brightness. Moreover, it is painted with even greater technical precision, confirming that the evolution of López’s work over the years was driven by two radical processes: the exploration of reality and the attainment of technical preciseness. The fridge is so realistic as to be almost frightening. In his domestic portraiture, when the painter expresses himself through the drawing, his work is tinged with nostalgia. In Escalera (1966), Interior del baño (1969) [≥ fig. 11] and Luz eléctrica (1970) [≥ p. 83] López continues to treat the structuring of the space as a central and organisational artistic dimension. He preserves the phantasmagorical atmosphere by means of spatial devices such as the opening

14 Antonio López situates his uncle in his home in Tomellos, 1973

15 Antonio López Casa de su tío Antonío López Torres [The house of uncle Antonio López Torres], 1972-1980 Pencil on paper, 82 ∞ 68 cm Private collection