Offered by Stéphane Renard Fine Art
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Initialled and dated lower right "a/60", countersigned and dated on the back "aguayo 60".
A breath of modernity animates this iconic work, inspired by Velázquez' portrait of the Infanta Margarita, which reveals the immense talent of the painter Fermin Aguayo, then in exile in Paris.
1. Fermin Aguayo, a Spanish painter in Paris
Fermín Aguayo is one of the most remarkable Spanish painters of the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1926 in Sotillo, a small village in Castile, Fermin Aguayo had a difficult childhood, marked by the war. After his father and two brothers were shot in 1936 by the Francoists, he lived a wandering existence with his mother before settling in Zaragoza in 1938.
A self-taught painter, he began to paint around 1941, first in gouache and watercolour before tackling oil around 1945. In 1947, he was one of the founding members of the Portico group with six other painters, which claimed abstraction as its mode of expression, but the adventure was short-lived.
In 1952, he moved to Paris, fleeing the stifling artistic atmosphere of Zaragoza. This marked the beginning of a much harsher adventure, as he resumed his pictorial research alone, with the support of the Jeanne-Bucher gallery, his wife Marguerite Legrand (whom he met in Paris) and a few friends: this was the period of his abstract compositions, fragmented with knives, in plunging and centered perspectives, in the muted tones of the arid lands of Castile. Aguayo’s painting took on a new fluidity, a transparency that hinted at a vibrant interiority.
In 1960, he abandoned abstraction and returned to figuration. He turned to the great masters of painting through the centuries (Velazquez, Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto, Ribera, Goya, Manet and Van Gogh), to whom he resembled in his transition from abstract painter to painter of reality, in the sense of a deeply felt presence, a transformation of matter into something alive, as he himself would say.
He died suddenly of cancer in Paris on 22 November 1977. The artist is now part of the collections of the Museo Reina Sofia, the Museo Patio Herreriano, the Musée Fabre (Montpellier), the Musée Cantini (Marseille), the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, the CNAP, the Fondation Planque, etc…The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid held an important retrospective of his work in 2005.
2. The Infanta Margarita, from Velázquez to the fascination of moderns
Our painting is a very personal interpretation, using shades of pink, brown and grey, of the portrait of the Infanta Margarita, one of Velázquez (1599 - 1660) masterpieces kept in the Prado Museum (5th picture in the Gallery). The First daughter of King Philip IV with his second wife, Marie-Anne of Austria, the Infanta married Emperor Leopold 1st and died at the age of 21. She is also the figure in the middle of Velázquez' most famous painting, the Meninas.
In 1957, Picasso tackled this icon of Spanish painting to radically renew the way we look at it. A 1957 painting in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona bears witness to this research (last picture in the Gallery).
Three years later, when Fermin Aguayo took his turn to tackle Velasquez, he was at a decisive turning point in his career, moving away from Cubism and returning to figuration. It is interesting to note that the artist has profoundly altered the dimensions of Velázquez' work, focusing in on the figure of the Infanta, without all the space that overhangs her in the Prado portrait. The Infanta is depicted in a simulated frame whose colours are in harmony with those of the painting. As this frame is included in the canvas, we have kept the original presentation in which the canvas is simply inserted into a discreet light-coloured oak strip.
We find the same composition in another study of the same series Infanta - Study number 2 which sold for €17,000 (Hammer price) in Paris in 2006 (7th picture in the Gallery).
Aguayo synthesises the main decorative elements (skirt motifs, ear knot) into a harmonious composition that makes the Infanta immediately recognisable. The stripes on the skirt in this painting form an astonishing fishbone pattern of great decorative force. It seems that these studies constitute a step towards the larger formats also presented at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in October 1961 (6th photo in the Gallery).
After Picasso and Aguayo, this fascination with Velasquez' work continued throughout modern Spanish art. For example, Salvador Dali's Pearl painted in 1981 (in which he plays on the etymology of the name Margarita) , or more recently the research of Manolo Valdés .
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