Antoni Clavé i Sanmartí

ANTONI CLAVÉ I SANMARTÍ (Barcelona, 1913- Saint-Tropez, France, 2005).
"Paysage", c. 1947.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate issued by the Antoni Clavé Archive.
Stamp on the back.
Signed in the lower right area.
Measurements: 50,3 x 61,2 cm; 51 x 62 cm (frame).
This painting, made by Antoni Clavé around 1947, represents an urban landscape whose compositional structure and plastic treatment reveal the artist's formal research in the period immediately after World War II. The scene, constructed from a superposition of chromatic planes and figurative fragments, shows a partially recognizable vision of an urban architectural environment, while entering a terrain of marked spatial and visual ambiguity. The work is not presented as a faithful representation of the place, but as a subjective, lyrical and introspective evocation of the city.
The dominant use of green and blue tones generates a nocturnal or twilight atmosphere, charged with tension and melancholy. The chromatic palette is punctuated by touches of intense red and orange, which function as visual accents that energize the composition and direct the eye towards certain key areas of the canvas. The chromatism does not seek to reproduce the visible reality, but to construct an autonomous language that articulates rhythm, depth and emotion.
The architectural forms are fragmented, angular and juxtaposed, which contributes to the destabilization of the pictorial space and refers to the influence of cubism and the aesthetics of interwar modernity. The buildings, the bare trees and the figure of the chariot with horses in the foreground emerge between glazes and pictorial layers that give the work a dense and material texture. In this sense, Clavé makes evident his mastery of the mixed technique and his interest in the expressive value of the stroke and the brushstroke.
This landscape is part of a key stage in the evolution of Antoni Clavé, when the artist, after settling in Paris, begins to explore a personal language that combines the lessons of the avant-garde with a poetic sensibility of his own. The work thus manifests Clavé's transition from figuration to lyrical abstraction, and is a remarkable example of his ability to synthesize form, color and emotion in a singular vision of the modern environment.
He studied at the Barcelona School of Art, later working as a highly successful poster designer, in advertising design, ornamental decoration and as a contributor to the magazine "Pocholo" (Vives, 1931). At the end of the Spanish Civil War he went into exile in France, first in Perpignan, then in Paris (where he began his career as an illustrator and theater decorator) and later in Saint-Tropez. During the 1940s his work shows the influence of Bonnard, Vuillard, Rouault and especially Picasso, his friend. From 1946 Clavé made numerous designs for ballet and theater in Paris, Munich, London and New York, devoting himself more to illustration in the 1950s. In 1954 he stopped working as a set designer and illustrator to devote himself exclusively to painting, a period in which his work became more abstract and enigmatic and he began to integrate newspaper fragments into his paintings, resembling a collage. In 1957 he worked designing carpets and from 1960 he also devoted himself to sculpture (bas-reliefs, wooden sculptures resembling totems, etc., some of which incorporated objects found by the artist). When he moved to the south of France in 1965, his painting began to become darker and darker until it reached almost total black, using mixed painting techniques. In the early 1980s he produced a series entitled "Homage to Picasso" and another inspired by New York urban life. His work is kept in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Picasso Museum in Antibes, the Tate Gallery, the Modern Art Museum in Paris, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, etc.