Manuel Ángeles Ortiz

MANUEL ANGELES ORTIZ (Jaén, 1895 - Paris, 1984).
Untitled, 1958.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 132 x 98 cm; 156 x 121 cm (frame).
In 1957, a year before creating this work, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz returned to Granada after 32 years and in a new contact with the landscape and the culture of the city his painting was highly influenced by this change. In this particular case this piece is at a fundamental moment in his career, created just before his mythical series dedicated to the Albaicín. In the exhibition dedicated by the Reina Sofía Museum and Art Center in Madrid, it was pointed out that the work of Manuel Ángeles Ortiz is difficult to classify. This difficulty can be appreciated even in this work where an alternation of languages is evident (late Cubism, line drawing and round and monumental volumes of classical inspiration, etc.), a symptom of the different approaches to a return to order, promulgated by different voices, from Cahiers d'Art to Jean Cocteau or Amédée Ozenfant. Ángeles Ortiz was an independent artist, difficult to classify stylistically, as he did not stop experimenting throughout his career.
Representative of the Spanish School of Paris, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz began his training in Granada, in the studio of José Larrocha. He later completed his studies at the Escuela Superior de Artes Industriales in the city, and then moved to Madrid, where he continued his training in the studio of Cecilio Plá. In 1915 he made his debut in a collective exhibition, receiving very good reviews in the local press. At the same time, he began to make drawings for different publications. In the early twenties, following the death of his wife, the painter moved to Paris. There he paints frenetically, and has in Picasso his main support and first enthusiast. His painting abandons cubic forms to focus on fully dreamlike images, which he will present in Paris in his first solo exhibition, held at the Quatre Chemins gallery in 1926. In 1932 he returns to Spain, but his anti-fascist stance leads him to take refuge, once again in France, at the end of the Civil War. After a brief stay in Paris he went to Buenos Aires, where he became fully integrated in the artistic environment and lived there until 1948, when he returned to Paris for good. He is currently represented in the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, the ARTIUM in Vitoria, the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Contemporary Art Museum in Seville, the Fine Arts Museum in Grenoble, the Federico García Lorca, Mapfre and Telefónica Foundations and the Bargera Gallery in Cologne, among other public and private collections.