Home » Exhibitions » EUGENIO GRANELL. The Human Adventure

EUGENIO GRANELL. The Human Adventure

16 March, 2017- 12 April, 2018 Rooms 2 and 3. Second floor

I have a small notebook belonging to my father in which he jotted down titles for several exhibitions. The notebook is small and both the front and back covers, in yellow and brown, advertise: “Nestlé. Instant Nesquick.” I suppose it came with a tin or bottle of this product in powder form. My father loved chocolate. And this time it came with a surprise: a notebook!
Apart from The Human Adventure, the notebook contains other titles such as American Series; below this, Granell wrote other titles of his works such as The Treasures of the Jungle and Indian Heads, Things and Inventions, with suggestions such as The Large Lettuce of El Prado, Presence of Shade.
Below the title of our exhibition, The Human Adventure, he recorded the following works: Paolo Uccello on the Loose…, The Last Hero, The Cordoba Bandit, Chronicle of Public Prosecutors… This represented a great challenge for me and I humbly set out to create a list. It wasn’t easy. My father’s titles are full of literary, historical, mythical references; his great intellectual capacity covers the entire “human adventure.” I’ve divided the works in the created list into different groups to make things easier.
The exhibition, made up of 25 artworks from the collections and more than 25 documents belonging to the Eugenio Granell Library and Archive collections, begins on the second-floor landing with the collage Notes of the World Just as It Is (1960).
In Room 2 I brought together first of all the Characters that Granell painted on their own in the painting, like the one just mentioned, which stands out due to its beauty and rich colour, Paolo Uccello; which is followed by the wonderful narrative of the series of Cordoba bandits represented by two works.
In Room 3, following on from this first group, centred on male characters, is another one featuring a variety of impressive, powerful women.
I then continue with the Music series, which is preceded by the last woman of the previous group, Armida, a woman invented by Torquato Tasso for his opera Jerusalem Delivered, which later served as inspiration for many other composers.
It is well known that Granell studied violin and his original passion was to become a great violinist. Both in Santo Domingo and in Guatemala, as had previously been the case in Spain in the PAN journal, Granell worked as a music critic. Therefore, in the showcase, apart from two portraits of his friend Enrique Casal Chapí, we’ve included photographs of musicians dedicated to Granell as well as some published reviews.
Then comes a series of works dedicated to Art: sculpture, architecture, painting and at least two Spanish artists, Zurbarán and El Greco.
Every adventure has a hero and I feature this idea in the first room by means of two oil paintings, The Last Hero (1956) and Memoirs of the Last Hero (reproduction) (1973). In Javier Ruiz’s interview with Granell in 1994, Granell told him, “… the name of my works is an important part of them. It’s not only the end.”1 And we’ll study these works with this in mind. Likewise, Granell declared to Javier Navarro that “a painting is like a window.”2
The two oils that refer to the hero, anonymous in this case, are singular in the sense that in each of them the character, the hero, is depicted by the colour white: The Last Hero (1956) and Memoirs of the Last Hero (1973). The central figure –the hero– is painted in white, which María Zambrano accords the following meaning: “Leaving something blank, leaving it unpainted, means leaving it without an owner, uninhabited. Colour in general, and this colour in essence, is the banner of man per se, it’s a sign that man is there, that he’s done it, it’s his emblem.”3 Granell doesn’t leave the canvas “unpainted,” but he paints both central figures; both figures are more representative of a horse than a person (let’s not forget that in Guernica the horse represented the fallen Spaniard, the wounded hero). In the first work, the white is tinged with yellow using brushstrokes that produce a feather effect. The character riding it is wearing medieval armour and the lance forms part of the head, which also looks like a beak. It has hooves and is adorned with a skirt. At the bottom, the horse is standing on water and on land, with a desert landscape in the background. (According to Lucía García de Carpi, this work, The Last Hero, is a “surprising” canvas). This work, as well as Probable Genesis of the Coat of Arms (1956), “are inheritors of the principle of hybridisation and the metamorphic processes of the early fifties (…) and of the drawings that illustrate Isla cofre mítico.”4
In Memories of the Last Hero, the water is found in the background –now in the past? And the animal, more solid and featuring a more emphatic white, is standing on a yellow strip. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is its face, which is a reference to the perspective that is rarely depicted in this way in Granell’s work. (But we should not forget that he also uses this type of perspective, perhaps as a tribute, in the portrait Paolo Uccello Sets a Dove Free.).
In J.M. Bonet’s opinion, The Last Hero “is one of the ones featuring the most omens that he has ever painted…”5. According to Lucía García de Carpi, “the pictorial symbol –it may be either the brushstroke or the line– of a precise format, size and orientation acquires unusual prominence.”6
A hero is a character that “has idealised abilities and personality features that enable him to carry out extraordinary and beneficial feats.” The hero or heroine –there haven’t been any differences in this regard throughout history– has superior intelligence, has on several occasions experienced exile, frequently undergoes a marked morphology, his or her opponent is the enemy, he or she carries weapons; his or her death is usually violent. We identify with the hero/heroine because he or she never adopts a superior attitude; they are always on the same level as us. They place themselves on a par with common people. They face life with courage and are guided by universal values. Likewise, they frequently undergo a change of residence but, in general, they want to return to their home and family. They are complex beings.
As I see it, the characters that Granells presents us with and depicts in this exhibition are all heroes, great participants in the Human Adventure. (Natalia Fernández Segarra. Exhibition curator. Eugenio Granell Foundation Director)

1 Javier Ruiz, "El antropólogo de su memoria", Eugenio Granell, Diputación de A Coruña, A Coruña, 1994, p. 343.
2 Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga, Granell y el teatro, Eugenio Granell Foundation, Santiago de Compostela, 1997, p. 32.
3 María Zambrano, "Algunos lugares de la pintura", España y la pintura, ACANTO, Espasa Calpe, Spain, 1989, p. 43.
4 Lucía García de Carpi, Eugenio Granell. Mapfre Cultural Foundation, Madrid, 2011, p. 68.
5 Juan Manuel Bonet, "Un pintor poeta". Eugenio Granell. Mapfre Cultural Foundation Catalogue, Madrid, 1989, p. 15.
6 Lucía García de Carpi, Eugenio Granell. Mapfre Cultural Foundation, Madrid, 2011, p. 67.

 

INICIO Eugenio Granell, Apuntes del mundo tal cual es, 1960 FIN INICIO Eugenio Granell, Bodegón de Zurbarán, 1970 FIN INICIO Eugenio Granell, Paolo Ucello suelta una paloma, 1974 FIN   INICIO Eugenio Granell, Hatsepsut, 1991 FIN   INICIO FIN       INICIO FIN

Aquí aparecerá el título

 

 

CHARACTERS

Room 2

Jules Laforgue: 19th-century symbolist critic and poet from Uruguay; one of the first, along with Rimbaud, to introduce free verse into France.
Arnaldo de Vilanova: 13th-century physician, theologian and ambassador from Valencia, known in his day as the “physician of Kings and Popes.”
Cordoba Bandit: A character invented by Granell. Related with the bandits in southern Spain at the beginning of the 19th century during Fernando VII’s reign. Considered popular heroes. For Granell, they were symbols of freedom.
Perseus:  A hero from classical Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Danae, the daughter of the king of Argos. According to Greek legend, Perseus did away with hundreds of monsters. After receiving Hades’ helm of darkness and winged sandals, he cut off Gorgon’s head and turned the titan Atlas into stone to finally fulfil his destiny and save Andromeda.
Paolo Uccello: An Italian painter and mathematician of the Quattrocento; he stands out due to his use of perspective to create depth in his paintings.
Balso Snell: The main character of Nathanael West’s book The Dream Life of Balso Snell; he’s a youth looking for significance in several oneiric encounters inside the Trojan Horse.
Amenhotep III: A pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th dynasty that governed from c. 1390/1 to 1353/2 BC. He stood out because of the great building activity during his reign, unparalleled in Egyptian history up to that time.

Room 3
Hatshepsut: A pharaoh-queen of Egypt’s 18th dynasty (c. 1490-1468 BC), known for the damnatio memoriae to which she was subjected by her successor, Thutmose III, to legitimise his own reign.
Circe: According to Greek mythology, she was a goddess and enchantress of the island of Aeaea. In the Odyssey, she turned the sailors accompanying Ulysses into pigs and ended up falling in love with him.
Isabella the Catholic: Queen of Castile, Sicilia and Aragon (1451-1504), married to Ferdinand of Aragon. Her reign was marked by the final expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula as well as the discovery of America, thanks to her support of Christopher Columbus.
Hypatia: A Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, she was also an outstanding mathematician and astronomer and head of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria in the 5th century.
Nadja: In the autobiographic novel that André Breton wrote in 1928, Nadja is a young woman that he meets at the beginning of the novel and which he uses to structure it.
Genoveva de Brabante: The heroine of a medieval legend. Her story is the typical example of a chaste wife that is falsely accused and repudiated, due to the testimony of a rejected suiter.
Queen of Sheba: A legendary character presented in the Bible books of Kings and Chronicles, in the Koran and in the history of Ethiopia. An enigmatic queen with whom King Solomon fell in love.
Little Red Riding Hood: The literary character in the traditional oral tale of the same name. The tale was first penned by Charles Perrault. The brothers Grimm later wrote a new version.
Armida: An opera premiered by Gioachino Rossini in 1817, in which Armida is a Damascene sorceress that wants to harm the Crusade forces fighting in Jerusalem.
Enrique Casal Chapí: A Spanish composer and orchestra conductor that supported the Republic and was exiled after the Civil War. Founder of the National Symphony Orchestra of the Dominican Republic. A friend of Granell’s in Madrid, before his exile.
Zurbarán: An important Spanish baroque painter and a great exponent of Counter-Reformation art, distancing himself from Valázquez’s realism in favour of a chiaroscuro with more acidic tones.
El Greco: A Greek painter from the end of the Renaissance, who settled in Toledo, Spain; his works are characterised by elongated and very expressive mannerist figures.