TitleUntitled
Artist
Esteban Vicente
(1903 - 2001)
Date1985
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 42 × 50 in.
Framed: 43 3/8 × 51 1/4 × 1 3/4 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 1, 1986
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1986.215
Label TextEsteban Vicente was the only Spaniard of the first-generation New York School painters. Born in Turegano, Spain, the artist grew-up in the shadow of Madrid's famous Prado Museum. He studied sculpture for three years at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he met the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. After graduating he abandoned the chisel for the brush, stating that: "with painting, the thing that happens between me and the material happened right away. Especially with color." The artist had his first one-man show in Madrid in 1928 and a year later left for Paris, where he met such influential figures as Picasso and Max Ernst. After the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Vicente moved to New York, and his art entered a new phase of expression.In 1937, Vicente had his first American exhibition at the Kleeman Gallery in New York, but afterwards agreed to serve in Philadelphia as the vice consul for the Republic of Spain until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. During the following decade, Vicente became an American citizen and spent much of his time experimenting with various artistic styles while teaching Spanish at the Dalton School in New York. In 1950, Vicente emerged as one of the premiere abstract artists in New York when his work was chosen by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro to be included in the seminal exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, New Talent 1950. Vicente's style continued to evolve; in the 1960s, large, ethereal shapes materialized in his paintings, and in the 1970s he experimented with a spray gun to create edgeless entities of delicate layers. By the 1980s, after a lifetime of stylistic development, Vicente reintroduced the brushstroke and began to explore the relationship between drawing and color with an exuberance that translated onto his canvases.
Rather than adhering to the psychic automatism of Abstract Expressionism, Vicente relied on a more personal, creative process, stating that, "Intuition is what is important." "Untitled" is rooted in his intuitive, experimental excitement that laps onto the canvas in gentle waves of color. While the sumptuous orchestration of color conveys an emotive arrangement, his brushwork punctuates the tonal fields with the artist's personal touch. "Untitled" displays an ethereal elegance whose technical execution echoes the color fields of Rothko and Frankenthaler. The luminescent color and alternating warm and cool hues emerge and retreat into an ambiguous landscape. The tonal changes elicit a temporal, narrative element, suggesting the passing of the sun and time across the canvas of one's life. Vicente once said, "I'm looking all the time to express something that comes from inside." "Untitled" hangs as a testament to a creative process that matured over nearly the entire history of art of the twentieth century.
