DOI Heft:
Nr. 335 (April 1925)
DOI Artikel:de Martos, Ballesteros: A Spanish landscape painter
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19985#0036
could do. And looking upon their works solely as
points of departure, he took up his own baggage
of esthetic culture and the ingenuous inclination
of his own mind to interpret beautv as he saw it.
He set out bravely to procure his own emotions
directly from nature. In doing this he has created
what neither SoroIIa nor Mir, Monet nor Renoir,
Cezanne nor Gauguin could create and reveal to
the world—in short, an art just as great, but
which had no masters. For it is only the lesser
artist who falls readily into schools or whose work
is obviously an echo of that of a master. Prieto is
not of these.
The predominant qualities in the paintings of
Gregorio Prieto are tenderness and joy. In his
great canvases filled with light his soul expands,
like the rich and splendid pomegranates of the
south which contain seeds that glow like rubies.
His paintings are epics of the brush. His first
impulse is toward light, the gay, the laughing, the
splendid. He is a son of the people of La Mancha,
like Don Quixote. It was the vast, black, contin-
ually shadowed plains of this land that gave him
his love for the sun. But his spirit inclined him
to seek not only strength and power but the deli-
cate, the gracious. These qualities in his work are
illustrated in the examples shown here. Of course,
the color which distinguishes them is wanting, but
as well as black and white can show it one sees the
power in such a painting as "A Basque Bridge,"
the delicacy in "Purification."
Not for him the melancholy gloom of his
dramatically shadowed land, but the sweetly
alluring, the pensive. His restless and ambitious
temperament has led him to attempt figures and
genre. But they are not to be considered in the
same class with his landscapes. It is in landscape
that his personality has found expression, and its
greatest certainty and power. We must under-
stand, too, that Gregorio Prieto is not only a
painter of today, but of the future. His future is
something of magnificent promise if he keeps on
—as he is doing now—^converting reality into
beauty. He is the most sympathetic and powerful
figure in landscape painting among the artists of
Spain today.
thirty-six
april 1925
points of departure, he took up his own baggage
of esthetic culture and the ingenuous inclination
of his own mind to interpret beautv as he saw it.
He set out bravely to procure his own emotions
directly from nature. In doing this he has created
what neither SoroIIa nor Mir, Monet nor Renoir,
Cezanne nor Gauguin could create and reveal to
the world—in short, an art just as great, but
which had no masters. For it is only the lesser
artist who falls readily into schools or whose work
is obviously an echo of that of a master. Prieto is
not of these.
The predominant qualities in the paintings of
Gregorio Prieto are tenderness and joy. In his
great canvases filled with light his soul expands,
like the rich and splendid pomegranates of the
south which contain seeds that glow like rubies.
His paintings are epics of the brush. His first
impulse is toward light, the gay, the laughing, the
splendid. He is a son of the people of La Mancha,
like Don Quixote. It was the vast, black, contin-
ually shadowed plains of this land that gave him
his love for the sun. But his spirit inclined him
to seek not only strength and power but the deli-
cate, the gracious. These qualities in his work are
illustrated in the examples shown here. Of course,
the color which distinguishes them is wanting, but
as well as black and white can show it one sees the
power in such a painting as "A Basque Bridge,"
the delicacy in "Purification."
Not for him the melancholy gloom of his
dramatically shadowed land, but the sweetly
alluring, the pensive. His restless and ambitious
temperament has led him to attempt figures and
genre. But they are not to be considered in the
same class with his landscapes. It is in landscape
that his personality has found expression, and its
greatest certainty and power. We must under-
stand, too, that Gregorio Prieto is not only a
painter of today, but of the future. His future is
something of magnificent promise if he keeps on
—as he is doing now—^converting reality into
beauty. He is the most sympathetic and powerful
figure in landscape painting among the artists of
Spain today.
thirty-six
april 1925