Isaac Diaz Pardo

ISAAC DÍAZ PARDO (Santiago de Compostela, 1920 - Coruña, 2012).
"Annunciation", 1955.
Oil on panel.
Signed and dated in the right margin.
Measurements: 33 x 24 cm; 55 x 46 cm (frame).

Specialists define three stages within the painting of Isaac Diaz Pardo: the academic, another influenced by the renovators and the third called American. The one we are bidding here would correspond to the second stage, characterized by the influence of the group of the Galician Renovators, especially Maside and Colmeiro, as well as Renoir and Cezanne.

Intellectual, painter, ceramist, designer, editor..., he was a rich and plural personality. In 2009, he received the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts of Spain. Son of the painter and set designer Camilo Díaz Baliño, in his house took place several meetings related to the Irmandades da Fala, of which Díaz Baliño was an active member and in which personalities such as Castelao, Vicente Risco, Otero Pedrayo, Ramón Cabanillas, Antón Villar Ponte, Eduardo Blanco Amor or Asorey participated. His father was shot by the rebels shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, which made Isaac had to hide at first at his uncle Indalecio's house, in La Coruña, and then to work as a sign maker in the same city. After the war, he obtained a scholarship from the Provincial Council of La Coruña, thanks to which he studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, between 1939 and 1942. He then became a professor at the Real Academia Catalana de Bellas Artes de San Jorge in Barcelona and began to exhibit in Spain (La Coruña, Madrid and Vigo) and abroad (Europe and America). He later abandoned the plastic arts, turning to ceramics and founding with other partners the Cerámicas do Castro factory in Castro de Samoedo (Sada), testing with raw materials used in the primitive ceramics of Sargadelos (in Cervo, created in the 19th century by Antonio Raimundo Ibáñez Llano y Valdés), and obtaining high quality ceramics. In 1963, together with other prominent Galician artists, such as Luis Seoane, he set up the Laboratorio de Formas in Argentina, a precursor of other industrial and cultural activities such as the restoration of Sargadelos' ceramic production, in collaboration with Cerámicas do Castro (1963), the Carlos Maside Museum (1970), the publishing house Ediciós do Castro (1963), the restored Seminario de Estudos Galegos (1970), the Instituto Galego de Información, etc. It was the direction and administration of the Sargadelos Group, his best known facet and the one that would mark his last years. As a writer of essays and criticism, he wrote Xente do meu Rueiro, O ángulo de pedra, Galicia Hoy (together with Luis Seoane), Paco Pixiñas (with Celso Emilio Ferreiro), El Marqués de Sargadelos, Castelao, etc, as well as a large number of articles in newspapers, such as La Voz de Galicia.