Antonio Saura

(Spanish, 1930-1998)

El Perro de Goya, 1983

Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming Antonio Saura Catalogue Raisonné d l'Oeuvre peint currently being prepared and under the reference PERP@1983. CERT 365.21.11.20-01

Provenance
Galeria de Arte Arteunido, Barcelona
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1988

'The dog's head poking out, being our portrait of loneliness, is nothing more than Goya himself contemplating something that is happening' – Antonio Saura

A self-taught artist, Antonio Saura began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid just after having contracted tuberculosis in 1943 which resulted in a five-year period of immobility. Initially, Saura looked towards artists such as Yves Tanguy and Hans Arp to produce numerous oneiric compositions that depicted surreal landscapes conceived by flat yet smooth and refined strokes of colourful paint. In this manner and in between 1948 - 1950 he created the Constellations series, infused by Joan Miro's influence through his works from the 1930s and 1940s. It was in the gestural style of automatism that the young artist found a thinking place and that he continued developing when he moved to Paris and met the surrealist group led by André Breton. Saura become acquainted with French Informalism and the American Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. By this time, he had adopted a gestural and radically abstract style.

In 1957, after returning to Spain and with the desire to create a new pictorial language within the context of the European Avant-Garde movements of that time, Saura founded the Grupo El Paso (1957-1960) with other prominent artists such as Manolo Millares, Rafael Canogar and Luis Feito, thus introducing Informalism to Spain. Franco dictatorship also drove painting in Spain towards resistance: "this is not about aesthetics; it bears witness to the truth of a moral drama; it is the direct result of the mayhem that is profoundly shaking the country. It is therefore not a political painting; it is something more: it is the very expression of the creative forces that have been repressed for too long inside people." (Lasse Söderberg, in "Cahiers du Musée de poche", n. 2, June 1959, p. 64.)

Trips from an early age accompanied by his father to the Prado Museum in Madrid, greatly influenced Saura's future work especially through a deep impression informed by the works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya. In particular it was the work of the latter artist who struck a lasting chord and one work especially: Perro semihundido or The Drowning Dog (1821-1823). Sombre, enigmatic and iconic, this work featuring the head of a dog peering upwards from behind a muddy slope, would become instrumental to Saura's oeuvre. Goya composed this work directly onto one of the walls of his house La quinta del Sordo, and these murals would come to be known as the Black Paintings due the constant use of dark pigments and their dark subjects.

In the present work, Saura similarly uses a subtle and dark palette of black, minimal grey and brown, employing grattage to the paper and asserts a personal style that is isolated from the trends of his artistic generation, as the dog looks to succumb to his deadly fate or perhaps resists and fights for survival. A sort of remotely surrealist double image of affiliation, the dog then, also appears as a portrait of the painter.