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 ainting
in North Catalonia benefited from the big name French artists
and their travels through the south of France at the beginning
of the 20th Century which changed the history of art throughout
the world. In 1905 the light, the scenes of life and the architecture
of Collioure conquered Henri Matisse and André Derain.
Then in 1910 the town of Ceret attracted Manolo Hugué,
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They spread throughout the
world an image of ‘land flattened by the sun.’ Following or
revitalising the Fauvist and Cubist trends, these artists created
a movement that is still strong today.
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Hugues
París, "Spring" |
The
overexposure of painters who visited the area tends to obscure
the creations of North Catalan artists, such as the emblematic
work of Etienne Terrus, sometimes Fauvre or with abstract tendencies.
Historically the painting of the region attained a European
quality in the 14th Century from the hand of Pere Baró,
to whom is attributed the lithurgic coat-of-arms in the Cathedral
at Elne. His contemporaries Jaume Serra and Ramon Destorrents,
Gothic painters, were equally famous. In the 18th Century Hyacinthe
Rigaud (Jacint Rigau i Ros) signed the official portraits of
King Louis XIV and of the French writers Racine, La Fontaine
and Boileau, whereas Anton Guerra – another North Catalan artist
chose Madrid where is painted the King of Spain, Philippe V.
Subsequently, history did not favour this outcrop until the
20th Century. This was the era of the emergence of the anti-modernist
Camille Descossy, of the illustrator Balbino Giner, the landscape
artist Henri Escarra and the artist of the immediate Martin
Vivés, arriving to intrigue the art world. The contemporary
painting, open to the Parisian north and the Barcelona south,
is represented by the decorative tendencies of Franck Maurence
and of Pritchards, the installations by Roger Cosme Esteve,
the gestures and off-canvas forms of Serge Fauchier. And the
ethnologic inspiration, marked by mythology, the works of Hugues
Paris, presented since 1987, marrying the local value with the
universal, the figurative with the introspective in a walk through
memory.
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