Baltasar Lobo

Theseus and the Minotaur

1978

Baltasar Lobo (1910-1993) born in Cerecinos de Campos (near Zamora, Castilla) and dead in 1993 in Paris, was a Spanish sculptor of the new Paris School. His grandfather being a stonemason, from childhood Baltasar Lobo Casuero leart wood-working in the carpentry of his father. In 1922 he entered the studio of the sculptor Ramón Núñez in Valladolid as an apprentice where he sculpted wooden sculptures of saints for the processions. With a scholarship Lobo continued his training from 1927 at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, which he considerd as a "cemetery" and he left after three months. His father then joined him in Madrid while he worked at the cemetery making reliefs and heads, and he attended the evening classes of the School of Arts and Crafts, specializing in the direct cutting of wood and marble. Baltasar Lobo then discovered the works of Picasso, Dali, Miró and Gargallo. In 1934 his wife Mercedes Comaposada Guillén, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Amparo Poch y Gascón founded the journal of libertarian women's organization “Mujeres Libres”, to which he worked as a model and illustrator. Participating in the Spanish war in the Republican camp, his father was killed by a shell while digging trenches around Madrid. Most of his works being destroyed during bombings, Lobo fled in 1939 the Franco regime with survivors of the Catalan army, his wife leaving in the convoy of women. Escaped from the camp of Argelès, sleeping under the bridges of Perpignan, he managed to find her in a camp in thee Ardèche region. When Baltasar Lobo arrived in Paris, he slept again under the bridges and at the Saint-Lazare station, joined by his wife. He went to see Picasso, who was not at home, left him a box of drawings, came back the next day and enjoyed his generous and friendly help. He could then settle in the studio that left Naum Gabo, binding with Henri Laurens and working some years in his garden the marbles that he received. His figuration was then simplified, in the spirit of the works of Constantin Brâncusi, Jean Arp, Henry Moore. Lobo developed an archaic character and continued to accentuate his non-figuration, around the themes of the female nude, Maternity and Bather, inspired by the drawings made, in a tower above the "Blue Flats", during his stays around 1945-1946 in La Ciotat where many Spaniards worked at the shipyard. He met there Brâncusi and the Spanish painters Tàpies, Parra, Xavier Oriach, Pelayo, Palazuelo. Lobo exhibited in the 1950s and the 1960s at the Gallery Villand and Galanis (1957, 1962, 1964, 1966) near painters such as Chastel, Esteve, Gischia, Jacques Lagrange. A retrospective exhibition of Baltasar Lobo's work was presented in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. Subsequently Lobo was appointed in 1981 an officer of Arts and Letters in France and received in 1984 the National Prize for Plastic Arts in Spain.