Óscar Domínguez
Óscar Domínguez Palazón (born January 3, 1906 in San Cristóbal de La Laguna on Tenerife in Spain, † January 1, 1958 in Paris ) was a Spanish artist of surrealism .
Life
Óscar Domínguez Palazón was born on January 3, 1906 in La Laguna (Tenerife). His father was an important landowner in Tacoronte . His mother, María Palazón Riquelme, died before he was two years old. He spent his youth in La Laguna and Tacoronte on Tenerife. The Autorretrato con pipa (Self-Portrait with a Pipe) from 1926 is the oldest surviving painting by Óscar Domínguez. In 1927 his father sent him to Paris . There he lived in the house of his aunt and her husband, the painter Álvaro Fariña. The purpose of the stay was to promote the sale of his father's agricultural products, primarily bananas. In 1928 he had to return to Tenerife to do his military service. That year he showed his pictures together with the French painter Lily Guetta in the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Santa Cruz de Tenerife , which, however, were not well received by the critics. During this stay he met Eduardo Westerdahl for the first time , who became one of his best friends.
In 1929 he traveled to Paris again to settle there. When his father died in September 1931, he returned to Tenerife for a few months and exhibited his first surrealist works in the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Santa Cruz de Tenerife . In 1932 he returned to Paris. In 1933 he traveled to Tenerife with his friend Roma, a Polish pianist. There his first solo exhibition was shown in the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Santa Cruz de Tenerife . His works from these years show a style that is based on that of Salvador Dalí and was inspired a little by the Canarian landscape, such as the cave of the Guanches . In addition to painting, he also devoted himself to designing book covers at this time, e. E.g. the one for Romanticismo y cuenta nueva by Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo, a writer who comes from Icod de los Vinos , or in 1934 that for a monograph on Willi Baumeister , which was published by Eduardo Westerdahl in the publishing house Gaceta de Arte . At the same time he made his first surrealist objects. His development of the Decalcomanía also fell into this period. With this technique, black, liquid gouache paint is applied to one surface in an uncontrolled manner and this surface is then pressed together with a second surface. This technique was soon adopted by many surrealists.
In 1935 he took part again with two pictures in an exhibition of the Surrealists, which was organized by Eduardo Westerdahl and the magazine Gaceta de Arte . André Breton wrote the foreword for the catalog . Óscar Domínguez signed the surrealist manifesto Du temps que les surréalistes avaient raison in 1935 , which was published in Paris by the Éditions Surréalistes. When he was commissioned to do an illustration for the book La Hampe de l'imaginaire by Georges Hugnets in 1936, he turned back to etching . In the course of 1936 he took part in various exhibitions: in May at the Exposition surréaliste d'objets in Paris, in June at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, in December at the exhibition Fantastic, Dada and Surrealist Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York . He returned to Tenerife for the last time in May 1936 and took part in the Arte Contemporáneo exhibition organized by ADLAN and the magazine Gaceta de Arte in the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Santa Cruz de Tenerife . After the beginning of the civil war, he went into hiding in Tenerife. In September 1936 he managed to get back to Paris with the help of forged papers. Here he set up his studio in 1937 on Boulevard Montparnasse . Also in that year he took part in several collective exhibitions in Paris, London and Tokyo, as well as in the following year, 1938, in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme organized by Marcel Duchamp , André Breton and Paul Éluard in the Parisian Galerie des Beaux-Arts , where he could be seen with one of the sixteen surrealist alienated mannequins. In 1939 he was represented at the Salon des Indépendants and at the exhibition Le Rêve dans l'art et la littérature . The surrealistic artist magazine Minotaure presented his painting Lancelot 28º - 7º in print. When Wolfgang Paalen went into exile in May 1939, he left all his studio equipment to Dominguez. At the beginning of the Second World War he went to Perpignan . He later sought refuge with other artists at the Château de Air Bel near Marseille , where some of them were waiting for an entry visa for the United States. In the spring of 1941 he returned to Paris and worked with a secret surrealist group that came to be known as La Main à Plume . In 1942 he set up a new studio at 23 rue Champagne. In June he published the art theoretical treatise La Pétrification du Temps (The petrification of time) . Paul Éluard wrote the foreword to the catalog of his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1943.
In 1944 he designed the set and costumes for the play The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre . In October he took part in a tribute to Pablo Picasso that was held at the Salon d'Automne . In 1945 he married Maud Bonneaud , who years later married Eduardo Westerdahl. He had solo exhibitions in Paris and New York and also exhibited again at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In addition, he took part in the collective work of a wall painting for the Sainte Anne Psychiatric Hospital in Paris, where some artists had hidden during the German occupation and wanted to express their thanks. He was also represented at the International Exhibition of Surrealists in Brussels.
In 1946 he traveled to Czechoslovakia for the exhibition Arte de la España republicana, Artistas Españoles de la Escuela de París (Art in Republican Spain, Spanish Artists of the Paris School) . His relations with the group of surrealists around André Breton cooled considerably. In 1947 he made 32 etchings as illustrations for the new edition of Poésie et Verité by Paul Éluard and published his poetic book Les deux qui se croisent . He took part in the exhibition Spanish Painters 1939–1947 , which was shown in Paris and London. Although he apparently still saw himself as a Spaniard, he took French citizenship in 1948 after living in France for 20 years . His pictures were also shown in international solo exhibitions in London and Prague and in Bratislava and Milan in 1948 and 1949 . In 1949 he designed the set for a performance of the play La Place de l'Étoile by Robert Desnos and took part in the French Contemporary Art exhibition, which was shown in Copenhagen and Stockholm . One of his paintings was bought by the Musée National d'Art Moderne . He continued to be close friends with Pablo Picasso , with whom he spent a few days on the Côte d'Azur . In 1950 he had solo exhibitions in Brussels and Paris , and in 1951 in Zurich . He began to associate with the Parisian high society and created several sculptures for the residence of the Viscountess of Noailles in Hyères . When Paul Éluard , who had been one of his best friends, died in 1952 , he suffered from psychological problems more and more frequently in the period that followed.
A solo exhibition in Paris in 1953 showed that he was also interested in other artistic techniques: he showed cardboard boxes for carpets, which apparently were never made. His solo exhibition in Paris in 1954 was again a great success. The French state buys one of his paintings, which is labeled Tenerife . He also took part in the Surrealismo collective exhibition organized in Lima . In 1955, a retrospective of his work took place in the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels . His last solo exhibition was shown in 1957 at the Rive Gauche Gallery in Paris. On New Year's Eve in 1957, he cut his wrists. He was buried in the family grave of the Viscomtesse of Noailles in the Montparnasse cemetery. Since 2001, a memorial plaque on the house where Óscar Domínguez was born in La Laguna has been a reminder.
meaning
Today Óscar Domínguez is regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Spanish avant-garde that worked in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century. He was a very versatile and versatile artist who could express himself in different techniques. The figures and objects that make up his surrealist works have echoes of the magical, the mechanical and the sexual. The figures are often in a Canarian landscape, even though he spent most of his life in Paris. The most important contribution of Óscar Domínguez to surrealism was the reconnection with the decalcomanía , a monotypical printing technique from the 18th century in which an automatism uncontrolled by the artist plays the main role. It was used by him for the first time in 1934 to make the cover for Westerdahl's monograph on Baumeister, and it was soon used by many Surrealists. Another contribution Óscar Domínguez 'to the development of Surrealism was the theory of the petrification of time , which he helped to develop . The application of this theory led him to introduce crystalline shapes and angular networks into his compositions. Fossilizations of this kind can also be found in the paintings of René Magritte .
literature
- Emmanuel Guigon, Óscar Domínguez , Biblioteca de artistas Canarios Canarias, Viceconsejería de Cultura y Deportes. 1996. ISBN 84-7947-194-8 (Spanish)
- Guillermo de Osma: Óscar Domínguez surrealista , Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2001 ISBN 978-84-89884-30-4 (exhibition catalog in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French)
- Véronique Serrano u. A .: La Part du jeu et du rève, Óscar Domínguez et le surréalisme 1906-1957 , Hazan, 2005 ISBN 978-2-7541-0026-7 (French)
- Pilar Carreño Corbella: Oscar Dominguez en tres dimensiones . Gobierno de Canarias, Santa Cruz de Tenerife 2011, ISBN 978-84-614-5485-3 , pp. 132 (Spanish).
Movie
In 2008 the Spanish director Lucas Fernández filmed his artistic work in the field of surrealism under the title Óscar. Una pasión surrealista . The leading role was cast with Joaquim de Almeida (as Óscar Domínguez).
Individual evidence
- ^ Situational shaping of experience in modern art, pp. 222–225
- ↑ Georges Gérard, L'abeille noir, Houdement (GMT) 1998, pp. 161f. (Gérard was a lover of Alice Paalen. He dedicated his biography to Alice, who was called Abeille Noir among the Surrealists . See also Andreas Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin (Parthas 2015, chap. 7, P. 333))
- ↑ Raul Gorrono: Domínguez fue el único que estuvo artista canario en un movimiento internacional. El Dia, July 17, 2011, accessed on March 18, 2012 (Spanish): "Domíngez was the only Canarian artist on the international art scene"
- ↑ Óscar. Una pasión surrealista. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .
Web links
- http://www.gobiernodecanarias.org/cultura/oscardominguez/inicio.htm
- http://www.culturacanaria.com/arte/madrid/oscar/coser.htm
- http://www.teatenerife.com/
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Domínguez, Óscar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Domínguez Palazón, Óscar (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Spanish painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 3, 1906 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | San Cristóbal de La Laguna |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 1, 1958 |
| Place of death | Paris |