July Girona

JULIO GIRONA (Manzanillo, Cuba, 1914 - Havana, Cuba, 2002).
Untitled, from the series "El jardinero del garabato", ca. 1990.
Mixed media (pastel, watercolor and ink) on paper.
Signed in the upper left corner. Titled in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 34 x 41 cm.

Girona was a sculptor, painter, draftsman and writer with an itinerant artistic and political life. He moved to Barcelona in 1932 and then to Havana, where he studied sculpture at the San Alejandro Academy with Juan José Sicre. In 1934, a scholarship took him to Paris, where he studied sculpture at the Académie Ranson and absorbed the artistic effervescence of the city, traveling extensively in Europe, Greece, Egypt and the Mediterranean. In 1937, he settled in New York's Greenwich Village, joining Latin American circles with political passions. He contributed daily political cartoons to left-wing newspapers such as New Masses and La Voz, a Spanish-language newspaper that supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, gaining recognition from the Congress of American Artists. After the newspaper's closure in 1939, he returned to Cuba as a cartoonist for the newspaper Hoy, then moved to Mexico City, where he worked at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Back in New York, he studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet. In 1943, inspired by the International Brigades, he volunteered to fight against fascism in the U.S. Army, serving in Europe for two years. After the war, he returned to the Art Students League, where he formally began his career as a painter under the tutelage of Morris Kantor. He became part of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and a member of the influential 8th Street Artists "Club". His works were exhibited in prominent galleries in New York (Artists' Gallery in 1954, Bertha Schaefer Gallery), America and Europe. In 1963, he became a professor of graphics at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld, Germany. After the death of his wife Ilse in 1967, his cultural ties drew him back to Cuba, where he was recognized as an influential contributor to Cuban modern art. Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 1986 and posthumously in 2009.