Sedaví
He was born in Valencia on December 13, 1888. At the age of eight he began to show his inclination for drawing. Not very studious, he left school to go to work in the house of a fan painter and later in a factory. In 1904 he went to Madrid, to survive he painted fans commissioned by commercial houses, especially with military themes. His first important commission was a 1.50 by 2 meter canvas, intended for the Asilo de Santa Cristina de la Moncloa with the theme "six sad old men grouped around a bare tree", requested by its director Alberto Aguilera. This painting was exhibited at the National in 1910. In 1912 he moved to Paris and painted for the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul, a large number of portraits of the Venerable Mother and Saint Vincent, which they sent for their Missions in China. Then he received a small pension and returned to Madrid where he spent the First World War, painting miniatures for antique dealers, which experts and dealers attributed to 18th century masters. Later, in Barcelona he held an exhibition of pastel portraits that powerfully attracted the attention of critics, who came to compare him with eminent portrait painters, among whom Béjar is cited. In this period, a restless pictorial excitement took hold of him, causing a profound change in his subject matter and his technique. His palette, until then clear and bright in color, is reduced in its range to ocher and black. The world appears different to him when he contemplates it with new perspectives: men with all their defects, confused feelings, and the prevailing injustice with all its baseness and madness. He has a great predilection for painting Christs, Magdalenes, monsters, witches and macabre scenes, in which he put the maximum horror. Every morning he went to the San Pablo hospital to use the corpses of drowned, hanged and starving people as models, studying the process of their decomposition on successive canvases. This exaltation, which lasted many months, ended with an exhibition of these works. Barcelona critics, with some sympathetic exceptions, proclaimed the horror that these themes caused him, calling him “the painter of witches,” a pseudonym with which he would later become famous in the world. This disappointment motivated his maritime exodus, which would be crowned with great triumphs and a large production distributed among the most important museums and private collections in American geography. New York keeps two of his works in the Hispanic-Society of America. In Cuba, in the National Museum of Havana they have two canvases, in a Gallery they are: “Head of Christ”, “We will all be equal”, “The Truth” and “Life and its thorns”. Mexico is also the repository of many of its productions, both in the capital and in most of its important cities; as in Brazil and Uruguay. He returned to Spain in 1923 and settled in Salamanca, a period in which he performed a large number of Santa Teresas. In 1928 he returned to Paris, where he would remain for long periods and where he would carry out most of his productions. His great capacity and prodigious creative ferocity have allowed his work to also spread throughout Europe and be introduced into the best collections and museums, such as those in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Spain. The cycle of his hectic life closed on September 27, 1951 in Barcelona, bequeathing to humanity along with his art, a message that was sometimes ironic and sometimes apocalyptic; but always with suggestions so that reflection prevails.
Barcelona
