Madrid, June 17 (EFE).- The Thysssen Museum pays tribute to the Madrid painter Rosario de Velasco, a “great artist”, “silenced” and with most of her work missing, after a year and a half of searching of his paintings on social networks by his great-niece.
The Thyssen Museum, together with the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia and with the support of the city council and the Community of Madrid, will host this exhibition until September 15 with which this Madrid figurative painter who is present at the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum with his oil painting ‘Adam and Eve’ (1932), according to what the artistic director of the art gallery, Guillermo Solana, said this Monday.
But until reaching the rooms of the Thyssen, this first monographic exhibition has an adventure, the one lived by her great-niece, the journalist and co-curator of the exhibition Toya Viudes de Velasco, who always knew that her great-aunt was a “very great artist” (Madrid, 1904 – Barcelona, 1991).
Although he was also aware that his prolific work was scattered among family, friends and strangers, which is why he made a call in February 2023 on his social networks to find the paintings.
“And on May 20, my aunt’s birthday, everything exploded and the media started calling me, so we had a great reception and we found more than 300 works (…) this exhibition only shows those she painted in the 20s, 30s and 40s, but there is much more to teach,” he clarified.
According to the other curator of the exhibition, the cultural manager Miguel Lusarreta, the whereabouts of two of his best works, ‘The Bathroom’ and ‘Circo’, are still unknown.
Once the works were located, according to Solana, they saw that many of them were not in an “adequate state” to show them or to “judge” their quality.
So the museum’s restoration department got to work to bring out the shine with which these thirty canvases and other illustrations on display shine, such as those made for the books ‘Stories to Dream’ (1928) or ‘The Beautiful of bad love’ (1930), by María Teresa León.
Specifically, the visitor will be able to see in addition to ‘Adam and Eve’, with which he obtained the second painting medal in 1932 at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ (1936), from the Museum of Fine Arts From Valencia; two canvases that are exhibited together for the first time.
And other paintings such as ‘Portrait of Doctor Luis de Velasco’ (1933), who was his brother; ‘Things’ (1933), ‘Motherhood’ (1933), ‘Woman with Towel’ (1934) or ‘The Washerwomen’ (1934), this work that, according to Solana, “should be bought by some museum.”
Precisely the success of ‘Adam and Eve’ allowed him to exhibit in different European cities (Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris) alongside Vázquez Díaz, Miró, Dalí, Maruja Mallo and Ángeles Santos, among others, and to take a trip to Russia.
Friend of intellectuals and artists such as Delhy Tejero, Concha Espina, Consuelo Berges, Carmen Conde, José Gutiérrez Solana, Alfonso Ponce de León and Matilde Marquina, her biography also indicates that she was part of the Falange, where she was one of the first militants. in 1933, as she declared herself a fervent follower of José Antonio Primo de Rivera.
Later she joined the Women’s Section of her friend Pilar Primo de Rivera, but during the Civil War she was arrested and freed by her future husband, the Catalan doctor Xavier Farrerons, with whom she would move first to San Sebastián and then to Catalonia, where He resumed his artistic career and distanced himself from Franco’s rule.
According to Lusarreta, the fact of belonging to Falange is not the reason why her work fell into oblivion: “we do not believe that she was silenced because of this (…) she abandoned the project of going to exhibitions so as not to distance herself from her family.”
“When Franco comes to power – Viudes de Velasco has clarified – he remains in no man’s land, he did not support the Franco regime, but since he did not have a dealer he began to withdraw and be forgotten.”
After passing through Madrid, the exhibition can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia from November 7, 2024 to February 16, 2025. EFE
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