Rafael Zabaleta personifies the kind of contemporary artist who, together with other members of the

 School of Paris 

a wide-ranging loose group of French and foreign artists active in Paris in the period between the two world wars (1919-1939). They prospered in a favourable climate for art that permitted the coexistence of different avant-garde movements. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Spanish artists split into two well differentiated groups: one including Picasso, Miró, Juan Gris, Blanchard and Julio González, and another made up, among others, by Clavé, Bores and Ucelay.

, helped to create a new type of art. Zabaleta, a methodical, perfectionist painter, created an original visual language derived from the range of distinctive features introduced by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements. He was the leading exponent of the survival of regionalism in contemporary painting and his work combines Spanish Realism, Surrealism and Synthetic .

He trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, the city where he lived from 1926 and 1931, and he joined the avant-garde literary and artistic circle at Café Pombo. His interest in discovering new artistic trends led him to travel frequently to Paris, where he befriended great artists like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). On completing his studies he settled permanently in his native village, Quesada. His profound connection with his Andalusian roots is evident in his work.

Calle de Quesada (1953) is a painting in which content and form are merged. It is formally organised according to a geometric scheme derived from Zabaleta’s admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), in which the figures are defined with thick strokes and painted in vigorous colours from a Fauvist palette. The artist avoids the more anecdotal kind of landscape painting and focuses on the appreciation of space with an emphatic diagonal.