Untitled

Technique

Graphite on paper

Dimensions

Paper size: 46 x 32 cm
Frame size: 75.5 x 61.5 x 4 cm

Inventory

FM000148

Description

Landscapes and portraiture were the genres that Genaro Lahuerta cultivated most assiduously during his career, although they were not the only ones. His early works in the 1920s and 1930s displayed a figuration in which Cubism also left its mark, as well as expressionism and magical realism. Having trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, Lahuerta felt the need very early on to break with the Luminist tradition of conventional Sorollism, which had now become a school in itself. Together with his friend Pedro Sánchez, known as Pedro de Valencia, he explored the ideas of international avantgarde movements, creating landscapes and figures that were charged with a strong sense of escape from reality, seeking lyricism and a certain dreamlike aspect. In the 1930s, Lahuerta was part of the Valencian artistic avantgarde along with Josep Renau, Rafael Pérez Contel, Antonio Ballester and Francisco Lozano. He also had a very close relationship with writers and critics such as Max Aub, Manuel Abril and poet Juan Chabás. 

Along with the lessons learned from the avantgarde, among whom the painter particularly admired Cézanne, Italian Renaissance painting was also a constant source of inspiration for him, especially from 1935 as a result of winning a scholarship that enabled him to travel to Italy, Paris, Brussels and London, where he got the chance to see the works of the great masters in person. In the 1940s, his painting underwent a return to realism, an aspect that had always been present in his earlier portraits but which from this time onwards he applied to his pictorial creation. His figures – which predominated around this time, as opposed to the rich outburst of landscape painting from the 1960s – became stockier, and he detailed their features and the objects surrounding them with great care. But Genaro Lahuerta did not entirely abandon the emotional factor in favor of reality, since many of his characters are portrayed as being deep in thought or somehow connected to their emotions. 

Portrait of a Man Sitting is a very refined line drawing that remains faithful to the neoclassical tradition of line drawing of Ingres and Picasso, which was so deeply rooted among Spanish painters of the 1920s and yet endures as a style of drawing that is now truly classic. The man is sitting quietly before the sea, but his expression seems absorbed, with his head slightly inclined and a certain melancholic air about him. The economy of means further emphasizes the strength and confidence of the line that defines a tough sailor whose vigorous anatomy, especially the huge feet and hands, evokes the line drawings of Picasso and Benjamín Palencia. Lahuerta had shown a great interest in seafaring themes from the start of his career, firstly in magic-tinged scenes and later in sailors and fishermen, always portrayed with great dignity and a strong formal concept, such as the one that characterizes this drawing, and the two great allegorical compositions he painted in 1941, one on fishing and the other on the Navy. In these years, we can see how his painting monumentalize the figures with a classical influence, which is also related to the European realisms of the previous decade and the Italian painting of the postwar period. The contributions of Severini and Sironi and the influence of the ‘return to the craft’ and Renaissance painting advocated by De Chirico blended together to create the exemplary and timeless form that embodies this drawing. Here, the strong figure of the man recovers the essence of an already well-established iconography of figures by the sea: female nudes, mother figures and popular characters, exuding serenity and strength within a general Mediterranean setting. 

[Carmen Bernárdez Sanchís]