José Gutiérrez Solana

JOSÉ GUTIÉRREZ SOLANA (Madrid, 1886 - 1945).
"Popular guy drinking with a jug".
Oil on cardboard.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 46 x 24 cm; 52 x 31 cm (frame).

Painter, engraver and writer of expressionist language, José Gutiérrez Solana was contemporary of the generations of 98, 14 and 27, and considered by the members of the latter as part of their vital landscape, as Solana actively participated in the gathering of the Café de Pombo, in Madrid. In fact, the painter immortalized this gathering in one of his masterpieces, now in the Reina Sofia National Museum. However, Solana was a solitary artist, whose roots are rooted in a deep knowledge of Spain, its lights and shadows, its landscapes and customs. He spent his childhood in Santander and, encouraged by his father, began studying painting with his uncle. His precocious talent then led him to drop out of high school to begin to make himself known through various painting competitions. He then went to Madrid, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando and completed his training by visiting museums almost unknown at the time, such as the National Archaeological Museum.
Already in the 1920s we find him as a personality on the fringes of his time, reflecting in his paintings dark, almost marginal popular atmospheres: taverns, soup kitchens, flea markets, chorus and cupletists, fishing ports, processions, brothels, tavern or sacristy gatherings, executions... Starting from the work of Regoyos and Zuloaga, Solana brings to its peak the criticism of the social situation in Spain at the time, without offering any possible solution or redemption. This is reinforced by his palette, darker and more sordid even than Goya's, because it is nothing more than a reflection of what Spanish reality had become. His work will therefore be a visual metaphor for the impossible modernization of Spain. In his language, dark colors are placed at the service of the recreation of the harsh faces of his characters, combined with black strokes and a dry and painful brush. His work was controversial and discussed at the time, although in 1907 he exhibited individually at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and later in Paris in 1928. Initially rejected by the critics, Solana did not receive his first important award until 1929, when he won the Medal of the International Exhibition of Barcelona. A year earlier he had been invited by Edgar Neville to Paris, and there his work had made a deep impression on the cultural circles of the city. By 1936, when the Civil War broke out, Solana was already famous and well-known both in Spain and abroad. He left again for Paris, where he spent part of the war and where he found his greatest recognition. After the war, Solana returned to Spain; a few days after his death, in 1945, he was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Honor. Solana is currently represented in the MNCA Reina Sofía, the Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao, the Botín and Caixa Galicia Foundations, the Hispanic Society of America Museum in New York and the Harvard University Art Museum, among other public and private collections.