FEDERICO CASTELLÓN (1914-1971), SPANISH/AMERICAN
SIX SURREAL STUDIES AT PARIS, 1935

Pen and ink drawings with wash; each signed and dated ‘35 at Paris including:

“Nudes with Surrealist Figure in a Box,” heightened with colour wash; signed and dated ‘35 at Paris lower right;

“Draped Women and Muse,” signed “Castellon” and dated ‘35 at Paris lower right;

“Surrealist Figure with Hangman,” signed “Castellon” and dated ‘35 at Paris bottom left;

“Surrealist Woman with Floating Figure and Pointed Finial Posts,” signed “Castellon” and dated ‘35 at Paris lower left;

“Surrealist Landscape with Adam and Eve and Transforming Tree,” signed “Castellon” and dated ‘35 at Paris lower right;

“Two Draped Women in Mountain Landscape,” signed “Castellon” and dated ‘35 at Paris lower right


Each sheet 15.75 ins x 11.5 ins; 40 cms x 29.2 cms

Provenance:
Collection of Jerry Greben and his gallery Graphis Gallery, Toronto;
The Estate of Jerry Greben, Toronto

Note:
Born in Almeria, Spain, Federico Cristencia Castellón y Martinez emigrated to Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1921, at the age of seven. His lack of fluency in English made Castellón the subject of mockery among his peers, resulting in his early immersion into artmaking as a form of escape.

Virtually self-taught, Castellón became a protégé of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, to whom Castellón was introduced through a mutual friend. Castellón’s drawings—completed before graduation from high school in 1933—impressed the master painter, who showed them to the director of Weyhe Gallery in New York. Castellón was given a solo exhibition, at the age of 18. Rivera also persuaded the Spanish Republic to fund the young artist’s studies, which he used to study painting and printmaking in Paris and Madrid.

Castellón’s return to Spain was a pivotal moment artistically, provoking a “constant dream state” and helping to develop his veristic Surrealist style. Fusing illusion, memory and reality, Castellón is best known for his depictions of empty, desolate spaces inhabited by ambiguous subjects and objects. In an interview, the artist noted that “I think the great moving thing was my revisiting Spain and awakening all sorts of strange things that came up, like finding I had a soul, because these memories became real all of a sudden… And in my early days, my Surrealism was mostly, I felt, a kind of poetic mysticism…I always meant it as a kind of poetic mysticism.”

Works by Castellon are held in museum collections including Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.


Estimate: $6,000—10,000