ARTIST: Esteban Vicente (New York, Pennsylvania, Spain, 1903 - 2001)
NAME: Untitled
YEAR: 1967
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Restretched. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 28 x 20 inches / 70 x 50 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed
SIGNATURE: Lower right and on verso
NOTE: Please see another Esteban Vicente painting from 1967 sold by Rago Arts and Auction Center (2016-05-07, Lot 512). Signature on verso is absolutely identical.
PROVENANCE: Vered Art Gallery, East Hampton, NY (has original gallery label on verso). Ruth Vered, owner of Vered Art Gallery, was personally known with Esteban Vicente, and had his exhibitions in her gallery.
SIMILAR ARTISTS: Perle Fine, Norman Bluhm, Theodoros Stamos, Hans Hofmann, Michael Goldberg, Robert Burns Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Lewis Francis, Wayne Thiebaud, Willem de Kooning, Wolf Kahn, Milton Clark Avery, Robert Rauschenberg, Mary Abbott, Jack Tworkov, Conrad Marca-Relli
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 115619
WARRANTY: 7 days returns accepted if item doesn't match description

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Esteban Vicente (New York, Pennsylvania, Spain, 1903 - 2001)
In 1903 Esteban Vicente was born in Turegano, in the province of Segovia, Spain, but from the age of four he lived in Madrid. His father took him on regular visits to the Prado Museum, known for its collections of paintings by Diego Velasquez and Francisco Goya.
Young Vicente displayed a talent for drawing at sixteen, which led to his attendance at the Real Academia de Belles Artes for three years in the 1920s. His initial focus was sculpture, but he soon switched to painting. Apparently he found the education there to be too conventional, saying, “it doesn’t give you any ideas about anything. It gives you the tools, and teaches you about materials. Academic training is safe. It prepares you to be against.”
In the late 1920s he went to Paris for a short period, but returned to Spain in 1930. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936 he sided with the loyalists and painted camouflage for a few months, but late in the year he moved to the United States. For three years he lived in Philadelphia and served the Spanish Republic as vice-consul.
He relocated to New York City in 1939 and during the next decade he began to frequent the Cedar Tavern, a bar in lower Manhattan where other abstract expressionists, including Willem de Kooning Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, hung out. In 1950 the dealer Samuel Kootz and the critic Clement Greenberg—both important figures for the promulgation of abstract expressionism—collaborated on an exhibition, Talent 1950. It included Vicente, Kline, and Larry Rivers.
During the late 1930s Vicente was approached about a teaching position at Black Mountain College, which not materialize for undocumented reasons. He returned, however, in 1953 and taught painting during a summer devoted to music and dance. He also taught in Berkeley in 1954 and 1958, at New York University, 1959–1969, Yale University, 1960–1961, and the University of California, Los Angeles, 1962. He was artist-in-residence at Princeton University, 1965–1966 and again 1969–1972.
From about 1964 he maintained a residence and studio in Bridgehampton, on Long Island, which is where he died in 2001. Three years prior to his death, the Museum of Contemporary Art Esteban Vicente opened in Segovia, with a core collection of over one hundred and fifty works donated by the artist and his wife.
Affiliated with the abstract expressionists, like many of them Vicente preferred non-representational canvases painted thickly with visible gestures. Typically, large shapes suspended in space dominate his compositions. His ability to work with painterly surfaces may be the result of the early influence of Velasquez and Goya, considered by some to be proto-impressionists for their use of impasto. Vicente once declared: “The pigment is a very complicated thing. A painter has to deal with the physicality first.”
Vicente continued to work and exhibited regularly well into his nineties. In 1991, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia awarded him the Gold Medal of Honor in the Fine Arts, Spain's most important honor in the arts. Vicente died in Bridgehampton, New York, in 2001.
In addition to the Museum de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, the artist's work is held in most major museums in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.