José Guerrero

(Granada, 1914 – Barcelona, 1991)

Green, Blue, Magenta, Red, Yellow & Black

1985

The Dawn portfolio

etching and aquatint on paper (16/75)

76 x 57.3 cm

Inv. no. 31063, 31064, 31065, P04223, P04224 y P04225

BBVA Collection Spain


José Guerrero played an instrumental role in the development of non-figurative painting in Spain, and was one of the few Spanish artists in the American Abstract Expressionist movement. From a very early age he was highly sensitive to the tones of his surrounding environs and landscape, which he would constantly represent in his works. After a period training at the School of Arts and Crafts of Granada and the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, Guerrero moved to Paris. His first contacts with the avant-garde art circles in Paris would leave an indelible mark on his future visual language. That being said, his style was only to be consolidated in New York, where he settled in 1950 with his wife, Roxanne Whittier Pollock, in search of new challenges and opportunities. It would be in the United States where, after a tireless process of research, he would finally find a language of his own, defined by a highly expressive use of colour and powerful gesturality, influenced by his connections with the artists from the
.

Guerrero’s New York period would also be crucial for his graphic art. Indeed, he began to create graphic works in the early-1950s, guided by Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988) at
in the Big Apple. His collaboration with that experimental printing and engraving studio—using the “multi-colour printmaking” method, known for accelerating the working process, with an end result closer to the creative impulse—allowed him to obtain conceptual and visual results he had not yet achieved on canvas: by stripping the piece of all spatial and realist references, the artist arrived at pure abstraction. As from 1970 onwards, graphic art would play a particularly important role in Guerrero’s practice, affording greater dissemination and commercialization of his work. In that decade he devoted himself particularly to lithographs and silkscreens, which he discovered with Abel Martín (1931-1993), producing portfolios he would continue working on in the 1980s, when he returned to
and
and created two of his large suites at Taller Mayor 28: New York-Madrid and The Dawn. The latter, published by Galería Antonio Machón, consisting of six etchings, is an excellent example of his mature period. The BBVA Collection possesses a complete series (16/75). 

This body of work evinces the preponderant role of colour in José Guerrero’s art, something the artist himself emphasised in 1988: “Colour expands. It never stops.” He did not choose his colours randomly. Each choice has its own meaning inasmuch as it embodies the expression of a memory or lived experience. Thus, red alludes to almagra, a pigment widely used in Andalusia; black has a melancholic connotation that connects it with the period of mourning his family went through in his childhood; yellow is suggestive of wheat fields, which he remembered from the summers he spent with his grandparents in Chite, also evoking the light of his land of birth; and blue, reminiscent of his childhood in Granada, as he himself recalls: “It was the colour they used to paint the skirting board at home… indigo.” There are five preparatory drawings from 1984 for those engravings (CR 1104, CR 1105, CR 1106, CR 1107 and CR 1108) that bring to the fore the process of creation of the artist who, instead of improvising on the canvas or the blank sheet, studied every detail of the composition beforehand. However, his gestural brushwork and the vibrancy of the colour create a sense of spontaneity. Worth noting is the fact that, notwithstanding the small format, the mastery of his graphic technique allowed him to bring to the paper the power of his large canvases which, like those by Mark Rothko (1903-1970), invite contemplation and introspection through form and colour.

Starting out from the sketch for the
in this series called Black, the artist created a silkscreen on which he intervened with oil paint in 1984, which in turn served as the basis for the composition and tones of the painting Ivory Black from 1985.