Antonio Saura

(Huesca, 1930 – Cuenca, 1998)

Dora Maar 15.5.83

1983

oil on canvas

130 x 96.8 cm

Inv. no. 2726

BBVA Collection Spain



Antonio Saura’s early painting was in the orbit of Surrealism, producing a body of work made up of dream-like landscapes reminiscent of the aesthetic of Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) and the organic forms of Jean Arp (1886-1966). In 1967, after settling in Paris, his practice soon shifted towards abstraction and a rigorous
 with an evident predominance of black and white. With the passing of time, the informalista lines gave way to powerful expressionist figuration defined by a spontaneous, dynamic and daring quality.

Portraiture, traditionally a key genre in Spanish art, accounted for a significant part of Saura’s output. Throughout his career, Saura undertook a number of different series from a highly personal perspective, in which the appearance of the portrayed characters was diluted, reduced to violent brushstrokes. These deformed profiles contrast with the neutral background, accentuating the ferocity of the image, as borne out by this magnificent painting that belonged to one of this artist’s most celebrated bodies of work, dedicated to Dora Maar (1907-1997).

This painting belongs to a series Antonio Saura produced in 1983 in response to an invitation from the director of Musée Picasso in Antibes to thirteen artists to present a work in homage to the master for the Bonjour Monsieur Picasso exhibition, commemorating the tenth anniversary of his death. For that project he drew inspiration from Femme au chapeau bleu 3.10.39, a portrait Picasso had made of the painter, photographer and sculptor Henriette Theodora Markovitch, better known as Dora Maar. The delicate painting by Picasso had had a strong impact on Saura, who described it as follows: “I memorised it forever and I can draw it blindfold. I know exactly how it all looks: the hat, the nose, elongated like an elephant’s trunk, that bulging eye, that swollen neck and that little kind of
on the rounded black body.”

In this composition, Saura recreates the same model, dissolving it into anonymity with very energetic, gestural, thick brushstrokes, almost scrawled, and with a palette of blacks, greys, siennas and whites which refer us back to the anthropological Spanish tradition of the monstrous, derived from Baroque painting and from Goya.

Although the series was continued afterwards, the first pictures he produced for Bonjour Monsieur Picasso were painted between 25 April and 25 May 1983 and went on show at Galeríe Stadler in Paris in July that year.