Menchu Gal

(Irún, 1919 ─ San Sebastián, 2008)

Port of San Sebastian

ca. 1970

oil on HDF board

50 x 65.5 cm

Inv. no. P01569

BBVA Collection Spain



Landscape painting was Menchu Gal’s genre of choice and accounted for a large part of her output. At the time when she painted this particular work, the early-seventies, the artist had already garnered widespread recognition and commercial success, with frequent exhibitions in art museums and galleries.

Together with the representation of the landscape of Castile, and in spite of having taken up residence in Madrid in 1946, northern landscapes abound in her work, depicting a variety of settings with the changing light and weather conditions of that part of Spain. Gal travelled regularly to her hometown and kept ties with the
which revolved around her first master, Gaspar Montes Iturrioz (1901-1998). This brought her into closer contact with Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969), who had also taught her at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and as a result her style evolved towards greater abstraction.

The image of the harbour, so recurrent in Basque painting, was also frequent in Gal’s paintings. The work in hand shows the port of San Sebastian in a depiction evincing the qualities of a well-experienced artist, who synthesises and resolves her compositions with agility and determination. Whenever the dimensions of the painting allowed, Gal created her landscapes in situ, finishing them later at the studio, where she applied more precise alterations. She usually adopted a frontal viewpoint, generally slightly elevated, avoiding a sense of depth and managing to achieve a highly sketchy whole, built by juxtaposing areas of colour.

This work is a good example of the artist’s style around that period, which opened up a new phase in which her work shed its previous geometric rigidity and darkness, giving way to a livelier language full of textures and nuances. It combines areas where the oil paint appears more diluted, contrasting with others where the objects are highlighted through a denser application of paint. She alternated the direction and length of her brushstrokes, reserving the use of geometry for architectural elements and she opted for red, blue and green tones—generally predominant and applied without mixing—to give the scene a cleaner, brighter and more luminous appearance. Throughout that decade, colour would acquire a more significant role in Gal’s works, and by the 1980s her language was widely considered as “fauvist expressionism.”