Godofredo Ortega Muñoz

GODOFREDO ORTEGA MUÑOZ (San Vicente de Alcántara, Badajoz, 1899 - Madrid, 1982)
"Landscape of Lake Maggiore", ca. 1920.
Oil on cardboard.
Provenance: -Private collection, Massimo Uscelli, Italy. Inherited from his grandparents, who received it from the painter during their stay in the house on Via Antonio Rosmini, in Stresa, near Lake Maggiore. -Private collection, Turin.
Measurements: 35 x 45 cm; 60 x 70 cm (frame).

Ortega Muñoz immortalizes in this painting a wide panoramic of the idyllic mountainous landscape of the Maggiore Lake, cut out to the bottom by blue motañas of snowy summits. Ortega lived in this area of northern Italy, close to the Swiss border, so he portrayed it on numerous occasions, showing a great handling of the shades and lights of this icy region. Ortega, heir to the Vallecas school, often prioritized this type of stark landscapes, realistic but far from academic, a solitary space with which he seeks to awaken the viewer's emotions.

The piece belongs to the fruitful stage of the artist's youth, prior to his more refined and essentialist language. It shows an Ortega Muñoz still open to chromatic experimentation and direct contact with the European landscape, with a luminous palette of blues, violets, greens and soft pinks, applied with loose and spontaneous brushstrokes.

Because of its early chronology, its connection with the painter's Italian sojourn and its documented provenance, this work is of notable value within Ortega Muñoz's early production. It is a significant testimony of his formative years, when the artist began to define his own view of the landscape.

Ortega Muñoz, considered one of the great renovators of contemporary Spanish landscape, was self-taught. In 1919 he moved to Madrid, where he copied the masters of the Prado Museum and painted outdoors in the Dehesa de la Villa. Shortly afterwards he traveled to Paris, where he became acquainted with the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, as well as the poet Gil Bel.

Between 1920 and 1922 he traveled through Italy, a decisive stage in which, especially in the surroundings of Lake Maggiore and with the English painter Edward Rowley Smart, he strengthened his will to return to nature and to a painting based on simplicity, spirituality and emotion. After further travels through Central Europe and northern Italy, he successfully exhibited in Alexandria in 1933 and 1934. In 1935 he returned to Spain, where he would end up rediscovering the austere and silent landscape that would define his mature language.

Ortega Muñoz is represented in collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the MEIAC in Badajoz, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, the Banco de España Collection and the Banco Santander Collection, among others.