Emilio Grau Sala

EMILIO GRAU SALA (Barcelona, 1911 - 1977).
"Padok a Deauville", 1960s.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner. Signed and titled on the back.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by Julián Grau Santos, son of the artist.
It presents restorations.
Measurements: 38 x 46 cm; 56 x 64 x 3 cm (frame).
In this work Grau Sala's very personal colouring is expressed in all its essence, showing his fauvist heritage and his decorative character, which plays with abstract patterns, textures, the superimposition of slightly undefined shapes and the contrast between cold and warm tones, always luminous and anti-classical.
The composition is clear and well constructed, with characters placed from the foreground to the background, reinforcing the spatial construction and breaking up the unity of greens and blues of the terrain. The latter acquires a vibrant, lively quality thanks to the expressive use of the palette knife, applied with energy and intention, using dense pictorial matter that plays with images closer to collage than to the old glazes.
Son of the draughtsman Juan Grau Miró, Grau Sala combined his attendance at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts with an essentially self-taught training. In 1930 he held his first exhibition at the Badriñas gallery in Barcelona. At the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1936, he moved to Paris, where he settled in the Montparnasse colony of Spanish artists. That same year he was awarded the first Carnegie Prize. During the twenty-five years he spent there he became closely acquainted with the avant-garde, although he always favoured a colourist figuration derived from Impressionism and Fauvism. It was a path already taken by the commercial circuit, surpassed in terms of novelty by Cubism and Surrealism, but which was kept alive at a high level thanks to masters such as Bonnard, Chagall and Dufy. In fact, he soon became known in Paris as the successor to the Impressionist spirit and values, directly related to Bonnard and Vuillard. This stylistic choice of Grau Sala's conditioned that of his wife, Ángeles Santos, who abandoned her singular surrealism for a more conventional landscape, a decision that critics did not hesitate to regret. The success of his style led Grau Sala to devote himself also to graphic work (engravings, lithographs, illustrations for novels, posters...), as well as theatre sets. The grace and finesse of his characters, the liveliness of the colours and the elegant atmosphere of the environments he depicted brought him great success and recognition all over the world. He held several solo exhibitions, mainly in Barcelona and Paris, but also in cities such as New York, Toulouse, London and Los Angeles. In 1963 he returned to Barcelona, when the stagnant figuration of Franco's Spain was beginning to be challenged by Oteiza, Chillida, Tàpies and the "El Paso" collective. However, he remained faithful to his style, and until his death in 1975 he worked in his own personal style, centred on his favourite themes, female figures, interiors and landscapes, in a vaguely classical, nostalgic 19th-century setting. After his death, and for more than a decade, Grau Sala was overshadowed by the many novelties that were emerging in democratic Spain, but from the 1990s onwards, the new boom in mid-level collecting revived Grau Sala, as he was seen as an interpreter of Impressionism in a Spanish key. Works by Emilio Grau Sala are kept in the Museo Nacional de Arte de Cataluña, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente and the Instituto Óscar Domínguez de Arte y Cultura Contemporánea.