Society and Culture
Francisco Goya (1746 -1828)
Francisco de Goya's work dates back to the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century covering a period of 60 years. He is feted as being one of Spain's greatest masters and is considered the 'father of modern art'. His work is credited with changing the way in which artists interpreted the world.
Goya's artistic career began when as a teenager he started working for a local artist.
Born and raised in Zaragoza, he later traveled to Madrid where he was influenced by the last of Italian great artists.
After a couple of attempts to enroll into the Royal Academy of San Fernando, he travels to Rome and does not return to Spanish soil until the 1770s.
After his wedding, Goya eventually is able to enroll at the Royal Academy and went on to become the court painter for King Charles IV. However, by this time he had become deaf and disenchanted with Royal life which culminating in the beginning of his darker works. During this period Goya, descends into more surrealism and is unable to present his new works to his old clientele but simultaneously continued to work for the Royal family and produced the masterpiece La Familia de Callos IV (The Family of Charles IV)
Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989)
Salvador Dalí began his artistic career at an early age and in 1922 he went to Madrid to study Fine Art where he struck up a friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca (poet) and Luis Bruñel (filmmaker). Through this friendship he began to work on avant-garde projects. After completing his studies in Madrid he headed for Paris, where he joined the Surrealist group of painters and sculptors.
It was in this period that he produced some of his most famous works, such as, The Great Masturbator, The Persistence of Memory and The Lugubrious Game.
In 1929 he met and became involved with a young Russian girl Helena Diakonova, known as Gala. At the beginning of the World War II, they moved to the US, where he worked on painting, writing and even a ballet.
During the 1970s Salvador Dalí created the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, which houses a large collection of his works, from his earliest days through to the last few years of his life. The Gala-Salvador Dali foundation was created in 1983, to protect his artistic legacy.
Pablo Picasso (Spain 1881 - France 1973)
Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881, to the artist Jose Ruiz. At the age of 14 he was noted to be an artistic prodigy when he was able to complete in one, the one-month entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona. After completing his studies in Barcelona he moved on to the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, before returning to Barcelona where he mixed with fellow intellectuals and artists.
Picasso's career spans an incredible 75 years and died at the age of 91 in France. His career includes, ceramics, prints, sculptures, prints as well as the world famous paintings. He was instrumental in the cubism movement but continued to adapt and develop his style, inline with technological and cultural advances.
During World War II, he resided in Paris, where he devoted his career to producing ceramics and in 1947 to 1950, he moved on to exploring new methods of lithography.
Joan Miró (1893 -1983)
Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. Prior to 1920, his influences appear to be wide ranging and are illustrated in his works, through the Fauves bright colours, the two-dimensional images of Spanish folk and the fragmented forms of Cubism.
In 1920 he moved to Paris and was heavily influencedby the artistic environment, mixing freely with artists, poets and writers. All of who served to stretch his already vivid imagination. Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry.
Much of his work, such as the 'Harlequin's Carnival', have a witty quality and a playful distortion of twisted shapes, constructions and distorted animals. The sharp lines, spots and curlicues were the predecessor to what became his generic style of using abstract figures, forms, spots and lines amidst bursts of colour.
As with his contemporaries, Miró did not limit himself to only one medium, he indulged in etchings, lithographs through the 1950's and then chose to work in water colours, pastels, paint on copper and masonite. The ceramic sculptures were particularly interesting and he now has two large ceramic works on the walls of the UNESCO in Paris. Miró died in Majorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983.