Saura, Antonio

b. 1930, Huesca

   Painter

   Antonio Saura is a major figure in contemporary Spanish painting. He was initially drawn to surrealism as a force for freedom and revolt, but on moving to Paris in 1953 he discovered that the movement had stagnated. Between 1953 and 1955 he found his way through a combination of Surrealist automatic techniques and the contemporary gestural painting of L'art informel. Late in 1955 he returned to Madrid at the time of the student protests against the regime and took an active part in the cultural life of the city. In February 1956 he burned his books as a sign of his opposition to Franco. In 1957 he was co-founder with the artists Rafael Canogar (b. Toledo 1934), Luis Feito (b. Madrid 1929), and Manolo Millares (b. Las Palmas 1926) of the El Paso group which, like the earlier Dau Al Set started in Barcelona in 1948, served as a forum for contemporary art. Saura's artistic programme can be seen as a quest to reconcile the present with the past, the modern with cultural memory and the autonomous gestural mark with the image, in a series of dialogues with both old and modern masters and both traditional and contemporary subjects. His paintings can be characterized as a series of portraits, often self-portraits, built up out of a dense network of highly energetic autonomous brushstrokes which contrast starkly with the monochrome flat backgrounds. On one level they are based on a dialogue with a tradition of Spanish portraiture from Velázquez and Goya to Picasso, made explicit by such titles as Infanta (1960), Imaginary portrait of Felipe II no. 181 (1981) and Dora Maar 20.5.83 (1983), while on another level the fragmentation of the images and dark palette speak of a psychologically dislocated contemporary world. Such paintings as Hiroshima, mon amour (1966), Crucifixion (1979) and Great Crucifixion (1984) deal with suffering and torture. His women series by contrast are compulsively sensual in approach; the very process of painting becomes an act of possession, as he explained: "When I throw a blob of paint on my canvas I am committing a rape…My portrait of Brigitte Bardot is at once love and protest". Saura despises decorative painting and feels that the social function of painters should be to transform life.

   NICHOLAS WATKINS