A carpenter's apprentice who rang the cathedral bells
José Guerrero was born in Granada on 29 October 1914.[7] His family had little money and he was orphaned young, so he learned wood before paint, working in a carpenter's workshop and as a wood carver's apprentice.[8] The cathedral supplied a second job: he rang its bells while he learned to paint.
He trained at the city's Escuela de Artes y Oficios. The Civil War caught him by surprise while he was doing his military service,[9] and in 1940, on the advice of his friend Federico García Lorca, he moved to Madrid.[10] Granada at that date offered a young painter a school, a cathedral and a famous poet's advice, and not much else in the way of a market.
Explore nearby · Museum
Casa-Museo Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla's Granada home from 1921 to 1939, preserved as he left it. His piano, manuscripts, gifts from Picasso, and garden views of the Sierra Nevada.
In Madrid he enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and attended Vázquez Díaz's classes.[11] What he painted there was figurative, and it stayed that way for another decade. Granada, meanwhile, remained the reference point he kept coming back to in conversation and, eventually, in titles.
The road to America ran through Europe. In 1945 he went to Paris on a French government grant to study at the École des Beaux-Arts.[12] He was in Rome in 1947 and 1948, where he met the American journalist Roxane Whittier Pollock; they married in 1949,[13] and he arrived in the United States that November.[14]
Philadelphia, then the New York School
The couple began in Philadelphia, her native city, but in 1950 Guerrero settled in New York.[15] The move put a Granada-trained figurative painter into the city where American painting was being reinvented. It was a gamble.
Betty Parsons, the dealer, soon introduced him to the circles of the New York School.[16] The self-portrait he painted in 1950 was his last figurative work, and from then on the canvases are abstract.[17] The early ones are simple, rounded shapes floating on a ground that is almost a single colour.[18]
- 1914
Born in Granada
- 1940
Moves to Madrid
On Lorca's advice; studies at San Fernando.
- 1949
Marries Roxane Whittier Pollock
- 1950
Settles in New York
His last figurative work is a self-portrait.
- 1954
Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition
- 1965
Returns to Spain
Divides his time between Spain and the United States.
- 1991
Dies in Barcelona
- 2000
Centro José Guerrero opens in Granada
The date to remember is 1954, his Betty Parsons show, which the Guggenheim credits with marking his emergence as a distinctive painter within the New York school.[19] Yolanda Romero, curator of The Presence of Black, notes that in the United States he was frequently considered a painter of "Spanish characteristics", but not a Spanish one.[20]
What the paintings look like
The Reina Sofía describes his style as a personal blend of the action painting of Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell with the colour-field strategies of Mark Rothko.[21] He knew the men personally: the museum records a friendship with Rothko, Franz Kline and Motherwell, and a commercial tie to Parsons.[22] Think of broad, weighted shapes, gestural edges and a limited palette, rather than the all-over drips most people picture. Heavy, then. Not loud.
Black is the word he kept returning to. "For as long as I can remember, black was always there, a part of life; it was in people, in landscape, in loneliness," he said.[23] The 1963 canvas Alpujarra, in the Reina Sofía's collection, takes its name from the mountain region in the province of Granada.[24]
From 1962 he began giving his paintings Spanish titles, among them Albaicín (1962) and Sacromonte (1963).[25] That is the visitor's clue: these are not views of the hills above the Darro, but a New York painter working out what Granada weighed. He also made what he called portable frescoes, laying sand, cement, corrugated roofing and refractory bricks into the paint.[26]
The Presence of Black ran from 17 October 2014 to 6 January 2015 at the Centro José Guerrero and the chapel of the Alhambra's Palace of Charles V, curated by Yolanda Romero with Francisco Baena.[27][28] The Alhambra's own notice calls it the first monographic exhibition to explore his American years in depth.[29] It then travelled to the Casa de las Alhajas in Madrid.[30] His 1956 oil Signs and Portents sits in the Guggenheim collection in New York.[31]
Coming home in 1965, and the ravine at Víznar
In 1965 Guerrero returned to Spain and from then on divided his time between his native country and the United States.[32] He and Roxane set up home partly in Frigiliana, in Málaga province, where they renovated a farmhouse he returned to every summer.[33] Like Alonso Cano three centuries earlier, he was a Granada painter who left, made his name elsewhere and came back to the city that had started him.
A summer trip through Andalusia with his wife, Roxane Whittier Pollock, followed.[34] They visited the Víznar ravine, where Lorca was murdered in 1936.[35] The story of that night is told in Lorca's last day and the killings at Víznar.
Seeing Guerrero in Granada today
The Centro José Guerrero opened in Granada in 2000, built around forty founding works.[40][41] It is a museum of the Diputación de Granada in the historic centre, climatised, accessible and free,[42] and it stands at Calle Oficios 8.[43] Good news in August. Air conditioning alone makes it one of the better places in the city to wait out a hot afternoon.
There are four exhibition rooms and a bookshop.[44] The centre is described as holding the most important collection of his work, though what hangs at any moment depends on the current rotation.[45] Its collection page lists a 1966 La brecha de Víznar among the works on canvas,[46] but check with the centre whether it is on the wall the day you go.
Practical points, all to be confirmed on the centre's own site before you go:
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20 Interesting Facts About Granada, Spain
Interesting facts about Granada Spain that guidebooks skip: disputed etymologies, the soldier who saved the Alhambra, and a river buried under Plaza Nueva.
Recommended tours
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- Opening: Tuesday to Saturday and public holidays, 10:30 to 14:00 and 16:30 to 21:00.[47]
- Closed: Mondays that are not public holidays, Sunday afternoons, 24, 25 and 31 December, and 1 January.[48]
- Guided visit for the general public: every Tuesday at 19:00, except public holidays.[49]
- Bookshop: catalogues, posters and postcards of his work.[50]
Abroad, his work is held by the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.[51] Granada is the one city where you can follow the whole arc, from the apprentice years to the black canvases, in a single morning. Go early, take the guided visit if it is a Tuesday, and leave time for the bookshop.