Huesca
Cuenca
Antonio Saura was born on September 22, 1930 in Huesca. He grew up during the Spanish civil war in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona in the company of his parents, Antonio Saura Pacheco, a state lawyer and technician at the Ministry of Finance, and Fermina Atarés Torrente, a pianist. He was the firstborn of four siblings: María del Pilar, the film director Carlos Saura and María de los Ángeles. Due to bone tuberculosis that kept him bedridden for five years starting in 1943, he began to paint and write in 1947. Without academic education, he begins his artistic career as a self-taught artist. He exhibited for the first time in 1950 at the Libros bookstore in Zaragoza and in 1952 at the Buchholz bookstore in Madrid, where he presented dreamlike and surrealist paintings. After his move to Paris from 1954 to 1956, he initially joined Surrealism, a movement from which he quickly distanced himself. He begins experimental work in series titled Fenómenos y Grattages. In 1954 he abandoned abstraction. In 1956 he made his first paintings in black and white based on the structure of the female body. After his return to Spain he founded, together with Manolo Millares, Pablo Serrano, Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito and other artists, the group El Paso (1957-1959). He exhibited for the first time in Paris at the Stadler Gallery in 1957. The following year, 1958, he participated together with Antoni Tàpies and Eduardo Chillida in the Venice Biennale and in 1959 he was invited to the second edition of Documenta in Kassel (Germany). . In 1958 he painted his first Imaginary Portraits from which the Brigitte Bardot series emerged. Between 1957 and 1960 he made several series of large-format paintings whose themes would recur throughout his work: Crucifixions, Ladies, Shrouds, Portraits, Imaginary Portraits, Nudes, Nudes-Landscape, Priests, Goya's Dog and Multitudes. From this time on, the chromaticism of his painting would be limited, for a long time, to the use of blacks, grays and earths. Assuming the trends of European informalism and American abstract expressionism, he will follow a personal career that has its roots in the heritage of Velázquez, Spanish baroque painting in general, and Goya. In 1958 he began with a series of lithographs titled Pintiquiniestras, which would be a fertile printed work that he would develop throughout his life. Also between that year and 1962 he made a series of 41 drawings titled Franco's Lie and Dream: A Modern Parable in which he caricatures the Spanish dictator. In 1960 he made his first screen print, becoming immediately fascinated by the multiple possibilities that this technique offers. Very interested in graphic work, he created a total of 632 works, collected in the catalog raisonné “Saura, the Graphic Work” by Olivier Weber – Caflisch and Patrick Cramer. A large part of the serigraphs are printed by Javier Cebrián. His work as an illustrator was prolific in quality editions of literary works, such as Cervantes' Don Quixote, Baltasar Gracián's El Criticón, Orwell's 1984, Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio in the adapted version by Christine Nöstlinger, Kafka's Diaries, or Quevedo's Dreams and Speeches among others. At the end of the 1950s he exhibited with his compatriot Antoni Tàpies in a joint exhibition at the 1959 Documenta in Munich. Both are the main exponents of Spanish informal art. In 1960 he abandoned the exclusive use of black and white in oil painting and began various series of cumulative and repetitive nature that he created on paper. From 1961 he exhibited regularly at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In 1965 he destroyed a hundred of his canvases. In 1967, he moved his residence permanently to Paris, he exhibited regularly at the Galerie Stadler and in the last year of his life at the Galerie Lelong. In 1968 he left painting until 1979, although he would continue developing his graphic work as well as creating large series of paintings on paper, and he would dedicate himself to writing essays on art. Antonio Saura married Gunhild Madeleine Augot for the first time in 1954, with whom he had three daughters: Marina (1957), Ana (1959-1990) and Elena (1962-1983). His second wife was Mercedes Beldarraín Jiménez. His heirs are his daughter Marina and his widow Mercedes. Most of Antonio Saura's work is figurative and characterized by conflict with form. His paintings are expressive and give the impression of being obsessive in his pictorial directness. It is a conflict with a world full of contradictions and lacking security, in which pessimism prevails. In 1997, Antonio Saura was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Castilla-La Mancha, which gave his name to the building in the city of Cuenca that houses the Faculty of Fine Arts. His acceptance speech was read by his daughter, actress and writer Marina Saura. Saura died on July 22, 1998 in Cuenca, at the age of 67, as a result of the leukemia that he suffered in the last year of his life.
