Rosario de Velasco, the artist forgotten due to her Falangist past and rediscovered by the Thyssen Museum

Like probably many of you, I had seen the painting Adam and Eve at the Reina Sofía, although Rosario herself signed it as Eve and Adam and I think we should keep its own name.

This is a picture of a evident pictorial quality, which runs through the foreshortening of its monumental figures, while they rest on a meadow straight out of a painting by Henri Rousseau and its characters look at each other affectionately. A scene that seems to sing that beatus illethat praise of country life that the poet Horacio wrote.

Modern in its classicism, it belongs to the generational group of the Sinsombrero, free and creative women.

From then on I attended as a spectator a unprecedented campaign in our country Search for your lost paintings. “I didn’t know how to find them and it occurred to me to set up a social media campaign,” her great-niece tells us.

The Thyssen had already decided to produce the exhibition and Viudes broadcast, almost in real time, the surprising discoveries he made: unknown illustrations or lost paintings that appeared after numerous media outlets had joined their call under the label “Twitter do your magic”: “Pictures have appeared that we were not aware of. Each piece discovered has been a gift,” he says.

The campaign was a great success because many of its owners did not know that they had a “Velasco Rosary” due to the complexity of its signature, a monogram inspired by Dürer, one of his favorite painters. This way 224 works appearedamong which are Gypsies and Maternitytwo emblematic pieces that had been lost track of after they were auctioned in 1999 in Madrid.

The monogram was a factor that encouraged her oblivion despite having been one of the most important painters of her generation. Her paintings traveled to five editions of the Venice Biennale, was invited to the Pittsburgh International Exhibition in 1935 – the most renowned in the world – and was part of the Society of Iberian Artists, among other distinctions. Now that monogram becomes the rebirth of yet another artist who is rescued from oblivion.

Could you guess her militancy in the Falange and in the Women’s Section (being a close friend of Pilar Primo de Rivera) the reason for overshadowing the luminous career of this artist?

Rosario de Velasco Belausteguigoitia (Madrid, 1904-Barcelona, ​​1991), was born into a wealthy traditional family of Basque origins. Her religious values, of daily mass, would not prevent her from becoming a woman of feminist ideas that she shared with her Madrid friends Delhy Tejero, Concha Espina or Eugenio d’Ors.

Trained in the workshop of Álvarez de Sotomayor from the ages of 15 to 24, at that time director of the Prado Museum, an academic from San Fernando and a well-known representative of regionalist painting, from a very young age. she was praised for her compositions and deserving of multiple awards.

His artistic education was classical with a excellent command of the drawing linein addition to his surprising knowledge of art history, something we can deduce from careful observation of his work.

In 1936 she traveled to Barcelona to make a family portrait at the house of the editor Gustavo Gili, there she was arrested and imprisoned in the Modelo prison, where she was on the verge of being shot. A young doctor named Xavier Farrerons, who would later become her husband, helps her escape, fleeing together on foot to Burgos and San Sebastián, finally settling in Barcelona after the Civil War. It is in this period when most of his work is lost despite the fact that the family keeps more than 200 pieces safe.

Upon settling in Barcelona, ​​although he continues to paint professionally, maintaining his own studio, loses relevance in the art world. Her formats went from a monumentality unusual for an artist of the time, to small canvases that flirted with abstraction.

Perhaps it was his lack of ambition that led him to never hire a dealerperhaps motherhood or that the trends of the moment were overshadowed by star painters like Picasso or Dalí.

She, however, continues to collaborate with several magazines. Vertex, for example, and illustrates books like Stories to dream by María Teresa León, wife of Rafel Alberti. As Estrella de Diego states in the wonderful catalog of the exhibition “the world that opened to female creators the illustration was approaching a certain camouflage strategy, the one that women have so often resorted to throughout history: dedicating themselves to illustration was, in the eyes of those in power, highlighting amateurism, the deactivation of aspirations to be a ‘great artist’. “It was a formula to free creators from some very common suspicions towards women artists.”

Being a woman and an artist was above political ideologies.
Their fight was a common front

These collaborations offered them unexpected complicities with other women of their generation, as in the case of Rosario de Velasco and María Teresa León, who, Although they militarized opposing ideologies, they knew how to create solid emotional alliances and artistic beyond their political inclinations. Being a woman and an artist was above political ideologies. Her fight was a common front.

De Velasco is an artist that is difficult to classify: while she worked on classic themes such as still lifes, maternities or biblical scenes, she also collaborated in modern magazines such as Blanco y Negro, Crónica or La Esfera, creating an ambivalent profile, modern in its classicism, conservative and ahead of its time, which includes her generationally in the group of the Sinsombrero, modern, free and creative women of the generation of ’27.

Finally, Toya Viudes’s fight is rewarded. You will finally see Laundresses, the spectacular painting of “Aunt Rosario” with which he grew up in the living room of his house, inherited from his grandfather Luis, in his first major exhibition at the Thyssen. On June 18, the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia is inaugurated with a tour, which is also a provider of The killing of the innocentan emblematic canvas with a biblical theme.

We also spoke with the technical curator of the project Elena Rodríguez, who together with Toya Viudes and Miguel Lusarreta as co-curators have carried out meticulous research work, complemented by the 56-piece restoration.

Rodríguez tells us that “there is a lot of work left to discover, although there has been a surprising percentage of works discovered” and that “except for Maruja Mallo and Ángeles Santos All the other women painters of that generation, except the writers, were relegated to oblivion.”.

Its elegant figuration, very modern and indebted to the first Renaissance, the Quattrocento, is part of the movement of the New Realisms, in which classicism is revisited in an objective presentation of reality.

This trend arises, curiously, from the European avant-garde from Germany – New Objectivity – and Italy – from the magazine Valori Plastici and the group Novecento– who during the interwar period advocated a return to order. His paintings from the 1930s such as Maragatos either Gypsies They are classic reinterpretations with a certain controlled fiction: “I don’t like any excessively realistic painting,” said Rosario.

Francisco Umbral wrote in 2003 in this same magazine: “But if war did not come to us, peace did come to us and with it that pictorial school with the quality of soft bread that the Zubiaurre already had and that we find in Rosario de Velasco, full of a green apple perfection among such masculine art.”

Perfection of green apple and soft bread. We cannot better describe his simple painting full of pictorial references, rhythms, planes, details, well executed, calm, fertile, fresh in his look at the past, full of women who dream, dance and careand with nothing to envy his contemporary painters.

“One of the most important lessons I have learned from this search is knowing how to wait. Years ago this would not have been possible. Everything has its moment”, this is how the Toya Viudes interview concludes – emotionally – after so much effort, and nothing could be more true.