The displacement of artists was part of the twentieth century’s cultural exchange. The painters Esteban Vicente and José Guerrero left Spain, their country of origin, to broaden their aesthetic horizons, the relevant careers they developed in their place of asylum, the USA, and their contributions, framed inside abstraction, bringing them recognition. This room displays some of the works they produced in New York in the 1950s and underscores some of the possible echoes the culture of political exile produced in their work.
The work by Esteban Vicente and José Guerrero displayed in this room, situated in the area of exile, places the stress on the connections and networks between Spanish culture and the careers of both artists, who in 1953 had taken part in the exhibition held in the Schaeffer Galleries under the title Contemporary Spanish Paintings. Internationally renowned artists such as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso joined other Republican exiles like Luis Quintanilla and José Vela Zanetti with a view to securing funding for the Spanish Department of Barnard College at Columbia University. At the same show the visual works of Federico García Lorca were also on view. The figure of Lorca, with profound significance to the exile imaginary, was one of the links between Vicente and Guerrero. The painters had met the poet in Spain and after the Civil War had visited his family in the USA — unsurprisingly, the García Lorca family and De los Ríos promoted the exhibition, the catalogue of which featured a prologue written by exiled writer Juan Larrea. It was curated by Josep Lluís Sert, one of the architects who worked on the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition of 1937, and James Johnson Sweeney, the then director of the Guggenheim Museum. Thus, country-of-origin narratives in this room are inevitably interwoven with events developed in the country of integration.
Artists embraced abstraction in the 1950s and gained visibility in the cultural field, propelled by their contact with gallerists, agents and painters from American Abstract Expressionism. Consequently, this room brings together a selection of major works from that era, accompanied by documentary material, for instance Vicente’s picture In Pink and Grey (1950), exhibited at Talent 1950, a collective exhibition curated by art critic Clement Greenberg and historian Meyer Schapiro in the Kootz Gallery. Also displayed is Guerrero’s oil painting Black Cries (1953), on display in Paintings and Murals (1954), a show promoted by The Arts Club of Chicago to accompany another on Joan Miró, Recent Graphic. The original intention had been to create a counterpoint between Miró’s works and those by Guerrero and Vicente, new Spanish painters living in the USA; however, Vicente refused to participate and wanted to be seen as an artist in the North American artistic landscape.