Eugenio Granell
Surreal figure watercolor spanish surrealism
1951

About the Item

Eugenio Granell (1912-2001) - Surrealist figure. Watercolor Watercolor measures 29x22 cm. Frame measures 56x49 cm. Eugenio Granell was born in La Coruña in 1912. He lived most of his childhood in Santiago de Compostela, a city that marked a large part of his artistic work. From a young age, he showed a great predisposition to art, specifically to music, and in 1928 he moved to Madrid to study violin at the Escuela Superior de Música. There he met the composer and director Enrique Casal Chapí. It is at this time when he begins to attend political and literary gatherings in Madrid cafes. His circle of friends - such as Benjamín Péret or Wilfredo Lam - brought him closer to the orbit of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), in which he began to serve in 1935. At the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, he joined the militias loyal to the republican government to defend the capital and combined this activity with the direction of El Combatiente Rojo, the POUM newspaper. After the war ended, he was doubly persecuted; on the one hand, the victorious fascist army, which tried to get rid of any signs of active resistance against the new regime. On the other hand, Granell would suffer the persecution of his own communist comrades, since, under Stalin's mandate, the POUM and its militancy -of a Trotskyist nature and opposed to the Stalinist line of the Soviet Union- were considered enemies of communism and, therefore, this, condemned to persecutions and murders. Thus, in 1939, he must move to France. There he finds a reality different from the one he was looking for and went through various concentration camps until, after several attempts, he managed to escape and reach Paris -where he will meet Péret and Lam- to find a way out of his situation, leaving for South America. On the train that takes him to the port of La Havre, he meets Amparo Segarra, a Valencian fleeing Franco's repression, who would become his partner. They embark to Chile but, given the impossibility of this country to receive more refugees, they divert to the Dominican Republic, where they will settle, now together with Amparo, in the capital, Ciudad Trujillo. There, the artist will become part of the Symphony Orchestra as first violin. In 1941 he met André Breton when interviewing him for the newspaper La Nación. From this meeting a friendship will arise that will last until his death in 1966. In 1944 he publishes the book of stories El hombre verde. In 1946, only six years after settling in, under the hardening of the Trujillo dictatorship, he refused to sign a letter of adherence to the regime, so they had to leave the country and moved to Guatemala. There he entered as a professor at the School of Plastic Arts, maintaining an intense cultural activity. At the beginning of the Guatemalan revolution, in 1950, he had to flee the country again, for fear of Stalinist persecution. This time the Granell-Segarra family arrives in Puerto Rico, where the artist will occupy the chair of Art History at the Faculty of Humanities. In these years he published Isla Cofre Mítico -which is tremendously close to the surrealist poetic style- and participated in various collective exhibitions at the Puerto Rican university. Although in Santo Domingo he had collaborated with him on poetry magazines, it was here that his deep friendship with Juan Ramón Jiménez was born. In 1958 he met Marcel Duchamp, who praised his poetic and pictorial art, which led Eugenio Granell to reinforce his activity as a surrealist painter. That same year he moved to New York permanently, where he will become Professor of Spanish Literature at Brooklyn College in New York. Along with his doctoral thesis Sociological Perspectives of Guernica -known in Spanish as El Guernica de Picasso; the end of a Spanish-public era Federica was not stupid and other stories and The Legend of Lorca and other writings. He moved to Spain permanently in 1985. He received numerous awards, including the Gold Medal for Fine Arts, awarded by the Council of Ministers. The Eugenio Granell Foundation was established in 1995 in Santiago de Compostela, the city of which he will be named an adoptive son in 1997. Its main headquarters are located in the Pazo de Bendaña, in the historic center of the City.

Creator:

Eugenio Granell (1912 - 2001, Spanish)

Creation Year:

1951

Dimensions:

Height: 11.42 in (29 cm)Width: 8.67 in (22 cm)

Medium:

Watercolor

Movement & Style:

Surrealist

Period:

1950-1959