International studio (81.1925)

mceRnAcionAL

The pupils who study here are chosen for their
merit; they take up their residence in the Monas-
tery for a number of months, during which they
have no masters, no guardians, and no obliga-
tions, except to paint what they like in the way
they like. In some degree the initiator and organ-
izer of the Monastery School was SoroIIa, the first
of all of our great landscape painters and a man
who understands very well the value of freedom
in art—and perhaps most of all in landscape art,
which must always be an individual, an intensely
personal interpretation of what the artist is look-
ing out upon.

Gregorio Pneto first challenged the attention
of critics at the exhibition given by the pupils of
the Monastery in 1916. He was enthusiastically
received by them all. They declared that this was
the debut of a painter of magnificent gifts, that it
was the rich seeding down for a great future. As
a concession extraordinary the Monastery of
Paular granted him three more years of study
there, years in which he worked tremendously and
gave an exhibition all his own in the Ateneo of
Madrid.

In the National Exposition of 1922 he won the
third medal, with the canvas " Purification, Nieves
y Encarnacion," which was bought by the govern-
ment for the Museum of Modern Art. This quick
success had astonishing results. During his ap-
prenticeship in the Academy of Fine Arts he won
the prize extraordinary, known as the "Sorilla
Prize," and also the distinguished commendation
given by the queen mother, Maria Cristina, and

still another given by the Society of the Friends
of Art.

As to his manner, his technique, Gregorio
Prieto is a Post-Impressionist. That does not
mean that he sees through the eyes of Gauguin or
Cezanne whose works he can know only through
reproduction, for he has never been out of Spain.
His original influences belong entirely to our
country. Some say that he carries on the tradition
of Joaquin Mir, with certain unmistakable remi-
niscences of SoroIIa, and that this is evident in the
picture, "The Garden of the Nuns," and likewise
in "The Garden of the Red Roses," "The Arbor"
and "The White Patio." But his technique is
much more constructive, richer of gamut, than
that of Mir, whose weakness—in our opinion—is
a certain lack of strength of character, of reasoned
architectural consistency, resulting occasionally
in diffuseness and a trace of impreciseness. At the
same time Prieto is finer, more sensitive and pro-
found in spirit and manner than SoroIIa, whose
work sometimes has a tendency to degenerate into
the rough, the coarse.

Joaquin Mir, in his great zest to pursue what
he calls the orchestration of color, the vibration
of light—in which he has even surpassed all the
French painters who have set out with the same
ideal—discards bodily weight and volume and, at
the same time, the natural and rightful outlines
of objects. In our opinion Joaquin Mir stands
outside landscape painting, because reality either
hurts his retina or else it never succeeds in reach-
ing his heart, and the result is merely a masterly

"the green mountain" by gregorio prieto

thirty-four

april 1925