JUAN MANUEL DÃAZ CANEJA (Palencia, 1905 - Madrid, 1988).
Untitled, 1967.
Mixed media (gouache and ink) on paper.
Attached photocopy of the cover of Revista de Occidente Nº49, 1967.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Size: 25 x 22 cm; 43 x 40 cm (frame).
In this work the artist plays with figuration, imbuing it with an abstract aesthetic that dilutes and redefines the forms in a plastic exercise where colour contributes great relevance to the construction of the composition. The importance of this work is heightened by the fact that it was a painting conceived for the Revista de Occidente, founded by Ortega y Gasset.
Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja was a Cubist painter, known and appreciated above all for his Castilian landscape settings. In 1923 he began his university studies in architecture in Madrid, and attended classes in Daniel Vázquez Díaz's studio to prepare for the subject of drawing. He soon discovered his passion and left his studies to devote himself to painting. He took an active part in avant-garde cultural life, especially while living in the Residencia de Estudiantes in the capital. In 1927 he met the members of the Vallecas School, Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez Pérez, and saw and studied Cubism at first hand when he spent the winter of 1929 in Paris. In 1930 he settled in Zaragoza, where he shared a studio with Manuel Corrales and González Bernal. A year later, in Madrid, he published with Herrera Perete an anarchist, Dadaist and surrealist magazine called "En España ya todo está preparado para que se enamoren los sacerdotes" ("In Spain everything is ready for priests to fall in love"), and began his long list of exhibitions with his first solo exhibition three years later. After meeting his future partner Isabel Fernández Almansa, he joined the Communist Party of Spain, an affiliation he would maintain throughout his life, and joined the National Confederation of Labour, and served on the Republican side during the Civil War, after which he lived and worked in Madrid. In order to avoid censorship, his main theme was landscape, for which he became so well known. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1948 for his links with the Republicans, spending three years in prisons (Carabanchel and Ocaña), but never stopped painting.
His work was, however, recognised with various awards (National Painting Prize in 1958; First Medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1962; Spanish National Plastic Arts Prize in 1980; Castilla y León Prize for the Arts in 1984) and with the creation in Palencia, in 1995, of a foundation named after him, which has its headquarters in the Museum of Contemporary Art of that city, His work has been exhibited in Madrid, Santander, Bilbao, Paris, Copenhagen, Zaragoza, Pamplona, León, Valladolid, Rome, etc., and is held in important private collections all over the world and in leading institutions (his aforementioned foundation, the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, etc.).