20th Century Spanish

A pupil of Vázquez Díaz at the prestigious intellectual and cultural institution Residencia de Estudiantes, Díaz-Caneja was a member of the . While in Paris in 1929, he met a group of Spanish painters living and working there and entered into contact with , a movement that exerted a key influence on his work, even though he would only use it in its strict sense for a period in the early 1930s.

His focus soon shifted to landscape painting, initially including human figures, and then pure landscape on its own from the early 1950s onwards. Thanks to the use of fragmented brushwork that unified the surface of the canvas and to a harmonic use of colours, always in soft earthy tones, the Castilian villages he depicted often blended in with the surrounding land. In the 1970s, this fragmentation began to give way to wider swathes of colour delimitated by subtle black marks that, in turn, paved the way in the 1980s for the well-judged, elegant compositions of his maturity.