BENJAMÃN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980).
"Castle", 1958.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate issued by Don Ramón Palencia del Burgo, legal heir of the artist.
Signed, dated, and dedicated to Don José María Moro, in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 33 x 46 cm; 51 x 64 cm (frame).
During this period Palencia isolated himself in the village of Villafranca, dedicating himself completely to painting, without any distractions that could disturb his pictorial exercise. It was then that he turned to the themes of views that reflected the lands of Avila, thus capturing the deepest Spain, but charged with a lively colouring that he recovered after a period of cold and arid tones caused by the consequences of the civil war.
Founder of the Vallecas School together with sculptor Alberto Sánchez, Benjamín Palencia was one of the most important heirs of the poetics of the Castilian landscape characteristic of the Generation of '98. At the age of only fifteen Palencia left his native town and settled in Madrid to develop his training through his frequent visits to the Prado Museum, as he always rejected the official teachings of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1925 he took part in the Exhibition of Iberian Artists held at the Retiro Palace in Madrid, and in 1926 he travelled to Paris for the first time. There he met Picasso, Gargallo and Miró and came into contact with the collage technique, which he later applied to his work, incorporating new materials such as sand and ashes. It was during this Parisian stay that Palencia's work took on a surrealist tone, evidenced by an increasingly greater expressive freedom that reached its peak in his mature period. On his return to Madrid he founded the Vallecas School (1927) and made his individual debut at the Museum of Modern Art (1928). Palencia gradually abandoned still lifes to return to the Castilian landscape, capturing it through a magnificent synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde. This personal aesthetic of landscape painting reached its culmination in the Vallecas School and, after a brilliant surrealist incursion in the early 1930s, when the Civil War broke out Palencia remained in Madrid and, like his fellow artists of his generation, suffered a period of profound crisis. When the war ended, between 1939 and 1940 his painting took a radical turn; he abandoned cubist and abstract influences and even aspects of a surrealist nature in search of an art with a strong chromatic impact, linked to Fauvism. Focusing on his work as a landscape painter, in 1942 Palencia took up again the experience of the Vallecas School together with the young painters Ãlvar Delgado, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Gregorio del Olmo, Enrique Núñez Casteló and Francisco San José. His work would include images of the Castilian countryside and its peasants and animals; his painting became a testimony to the rough, the coarse and the rural, to the subtle expressiveness of Castilian sobriety. Already fully consolidated, in 1943 he won the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and in 1944 he was selected to take part in the Salón de los Once de Eugenio D'Ors in Madrid. The following year he was awarded the medal of honour at the National Exhibition, although he renounced it in order to facilitate its award to José Gutiérrez Solana.