Angeles santos biography

A major artist of the Spanish avant-garde, Ángeles Santos Torroella was introduced to drawing and painting at the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception boarding school in Seville. In 1927, she moved to Valladolid, where she took private lessons from the Italian painter Cellino Perotti. Her first pictures, including a self-portrait (Autorretrato, 1928), were shown on the occasion of a collective exhibition at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. From then on, she chose to fully devote herself to her art. One of her major works, Un mundo (A World, 1929) was presented at the Autumn Salon in Madrid in 1929 to great critical and public acclaim, following which she was pronounced a leading figure of New Spanish Painting. She quickly integrated into avant-garde intellectual circles and made friends with Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose poetic works deeply impacted her. Her immediate fame was the result of an ambitious, modern and original approach, halfway between expressionism and surrealism, which revolutionised the artistic landscape of the time. Her bold and unacademic painting showed great formal freedom and developed a strange, poetic, and magical universe.

In the early 1930s, she exhibited her work in Spain and Europe, and had her first solo show in Paris in 1931. She then stopped painting altogether until 1934, by which time her husband, the painter Emilio Grau Sala, encouraged her to take it up again. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced her to flee to the French border, where she taught drawing while continuing to paint. She stopped again in the 1950s, but resumed painting when she and her husband were reunited after years of wartime separation. The boldness and inventiveness of her early paintings gave way to subjects that, despite being more traditional, she approached with the same liberal style. While Á. Santos Torroella’s work spanned the whole 20 century, it remained closely tied to the context of the

If there was one work that caused a stir in Madrid’s Salón de Otoño (Autumn Salon) in 1929, it was unquestionably Un mundo (A World) by a young and unknown painter called Ángeles Santos. The monumental painting, standing at 3 x 3 metres and executed in Valladolid by an artist who lacked first-hand knowledge of what was being produced in Europe during that period, mesmerised the intelligentsia at the time. Ramón Gómez de la Serna would write: “At the Salón de Otoño, submerged in the Retiro, a wreckage of leaves and mud, a revelation has emerged: the revelation of a seventeen-year-old girl. Ángeles Santos, who appears as the painting’s Saint Teresa, listening to doves and stars which dictate the feel her paintbrushes must have”. Santos made a surprising, original and modern work built around references taken from her immediate surroundings and from avant-garde magazines and publications. The most important of these was Franz Roh’s book Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism, which, translated into Spanish in 1927, gave her insight, through photos at least, into the work of artists such as Joan Miró and members of the so-called New Objectivity from Germany, with which Un mundo has much in common.

Raúl Martínez Arranz


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Bulletin of Spanish Studies Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America ISSN: 1475-3820 (Print) 1478-3428 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbhs20 Ángeles Santos (1911–2013) and the Mothers of Her Own Invention Roberta Ann Quance To cite this article: Roberta Ann Quance (2018): Ángeles Santos (1911–2013) and the Mothers of Her Own Invention, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2018.1497326 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2018.1497326 Published online: 06 Aug 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cbhs20 Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2018 Ángeles Santos (1911–2013) and the Mothers of Her Own Invention ROBERTA ANN QUANCE Madrid In Rompecabezas, a play published in 1921 by two Spanish ultraístas, the young heroine, an avant-garde artist living with her parents, confesses that if her mother would only let her, she would paint a landscape from the window of an airplane.1 Some of the incongruity of being a minor in terms of years and already a ‘master’ in terms of one’s work is undoubtedly what lay behind the authors’ gentle satire of the precocious young female artist who needed to ask permission to paint. But they have put their finger on an aspect of the avant-garde imagination that is worth bearing in mind. Airplanes were the emblem of Europe’s first Avant-Garde and so was the aerial perspective that they opened up on the world. Beginning, perhaps, with the eponymous hero of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor (1919), avant-garde heroes and their avatars set out to conquer space. In the late 1920s a branch of Futurism appeared called aeropittura. This remarkable development—which was directly inspired by the point of view afforded by aircraft—was practised by men and in Italy, w

Catalan Spanish surrealist painter

Ángeles Santos Torroella (7 November 1911 – 3 October 2013) was a Spanishsurrealist painter. Born in Portbou, Catalonia, she was the sister of the poet and art critic Rafael Santos Torroella. She married the painter Emili Grau Sala. Her son is the painter Julià Grau i Santos. In 2003 she received the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Spain and in 2005, the Creu de Sant Jordi, awarded by the Government of Catalonia.

Biography

She was introduced to was introduced to drawing at the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception boarding school in Seville. In 1927, she moved to Valladolid, and there she took private lessons from the Italian painter Cellino Perotti. In 1929 Santos Torroella presented her work Un Mundo (A World) at the Autumn Salon in Madrid. In this city she integrated into intellectual circles and made friends such as Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez. The next year she was given her own room at the exhibition. In 1931 she held a solo exhibit in Paris. In 1932, she participated in the Iberian Artists Collective in Copenhagen and Paris, and the next year was invited to the exhibit at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (USA). In 1936, she exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. She exhibited in Barcelona for the first time in 1935, at Syra Galleries.

In 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Santos Torroella and her husband fled Spain for France. She returned to Spain by herself in 1937. The couple