Esteban Vicente

ESTEBAN VICENTE

ESTEBAN VICENTE

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

ESTEBAN VICENTE

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

ACCUMULATIONS!OF!EXPERIENCE"!

COLOR#!CAMOUFLAGE#!AND! ESTEBAN!VICENTE’S!ABSTRACT!LEGACY

By Angela H. Brown

On a summer day in 1951, Esteban Vicente was pitching in an artists’ softball game in East Hampton, New York. The sculptor Philip Pavia, who had apparently been bragging to the group about his athleticism, was at bat. Vicente threw the ball. Pavia hit it. And it exploded in a burst of pink liquid.

The night before the game, Elaine de Kooning had stayed up late, painting a ripe grapefruit to look like a softball, so they could trick Pavia.1 The prank was a great success; not only did it inspire fits of laughter, but it also achieved in life what Vicente and many of the other artists/players were seeking to do in their work: to express a certain freedom from pictorial convention, breaking the rules of form, light, and color, and rebuilding them from scratch.

In the split second when the bat hit the “ball,” recognition suddenly gave way to surprise. And afterward, not a single softball could be trusted. Each might reveal itself to be something else. * Despite his close association with the first and second generations of the New York School, Vicente never considered himself an Abstract Expressionist or an Action painter. Rather than adhering to the fast-paced techniques of Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning (which were, however, far more methodical than many critics made them seem), Vicente pursued a less impulsive compositional harmony devoid of what he saw as action painting’s “violence.”2 This often involved a process of slower observation and a trained sensitivity to shifts in light and space, informed in large

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part by his profound appreciation of the Spanish masters, especially the Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán.3 Vicente’s abstraction is thus durational in two ways. He focused deeply on the micro-changes of the present (the leaves rustling in the garden), but, in so doing, he allowed for the reappearance of the past—even if in disguise. “If you paint from nature,” Vicente explained to Irving Sandler in 1968, “the subject is in front of you all the time to remind you of what you are doing. . .Then. . . I do think that what comes into your painting is an accumulation of experiences. That they are related in a very vague way to something that you have seen somehow, but . . . not seen purely through the eye alone.”4 What happens when an “accumulation of experiences” appears as pure color? * 4

The notion of camouflage is a complicated one when considered in relation to the rise of abstraction in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, major figures such as the art critic Clement Greenberg and the Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. championed the autonomous progression of art and esthetics—praising a formalism that they claimed could (and should) evolve independently from sociopolitical context. However, as Serge Guilbaut has argued, the formalism praised by Greenberg and other writers associated with what came to be called New Criticism, was political in its very “apoliticism.”5 Precisely because it appeared to be disconnected from political realities, Abstract Expressionism, for example, could be deployed for a variety of political purposes.6 While Vicente’s work fits smoothly into Greenberg’s and Barr’s formalist schemata, his statements about his process and his ways of teaching support Meyer Schapiro’s counterargument to the “autonomy of art” in 1937: namely, that “there is no ‘pure art,’ unconditioned by experience; all fantasy and formal construction, even the random scribbling of the hand, are shaped by experience and by nonesthetic concerns.”7 A look at Vicente’s work and the trajectories of his students reveals that Vicente successfully straddled both sides of the argument. He firmly believed in art

historical time lines and formal progressions, yet he maintained that an artist’s experience must make its way into the work.8 His masterful use of color, therefore, cannot be considered for its formal qualities alone. Instead, color must be seen as a shifting sign, a reflection of Vicente’s past and an invitation for the viewer’s (and the art student’s) future. * Though Vicente chose to keep politics out of his work—he once said “the important thing is to be alive. The rest is politics.”9—he seems to have been well aware of art’s real or at least symbolic power in the face of political ideologies. He refused to show his work in Spain while the military dictator Francisco Franco was in power, and one of the last things he painted in Spain before he left for New York in 1936 were the Spanish Loyalists’ tanks.10 Not paintings of the tanks, but on them. Literal camouflage— abstract swathes of green and brown—in direct opposition to the far-right Nationalists.

Vicente’s personal connections to the Spanish Civil War and its consequences surely fueled his strong reaction against Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic (1948–67) in 1963. In a letter to Art News, he wrote the following: Mr. Motherwell indicated that his titles reflect an involvement beyond aesthetics. . . .

Somehow, Mr. Motherwell wishes to be identified with the Spanish Civil War. . . . But the shock came when I read Mr. Motherwell’s statement about his first visit to Spain. “. . . I never got to Spain until 1958 . . . and then I discovered the Madrid plateau is yellow ocher, black and white!” Is this the reaction of a man who is trying to establish his profound involvement with a tragedy that affected a whole country and the entire world? A tragedy of injustice that shocked humanity! What can this possibly mean?11

For Vicente, the fact that Motherwell was using the colors of a landscape that he was barely familiar with to make a comment on the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War was shocking, even outrageous. This illuminates the complex role of color in Vicente’s own work. A mastery of color not only came from sustained, engaged experience but it also depended on it. To choose a color carried personal and political weight. *

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Francisco de Zurbarán Still-life with Lemons, Oranges and Rose, 1633 Oil on canvas 23.6 inches x 42.1 inches (62.2 cm x 107 cm) Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

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Vicente was a prolific teacher, holding positions at New York University; the University of California, Berkeley; the New York Studio School; Princeton University; Black Mountain College; and the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras). Many of his students, who include Chuck Close, Susan Crile, Brice Marden, and Dorothea Rockburne, note that Vicente was adamant about two things: the close observation of color, and the creation of a unique visual language. He wanted his students to be able to capture the hues and tones around them in order to produce new and productive vocabularies.12 Vicente taught at the University of Puerto Rico between 1944 and 1947. This was an important juncture in his career, as he had spent most of the previous decade in New York experimenting with the techniques of the early European avant-gardes and would in 1950 be chosen by Greenberg and Schapiro for inclusion in the exhibition New Talent at the Kootz Gallery in New York. However, one of Vicente’s students at UPR, Olga Albizu, explained that Vicente did not teach abstraction. Rather, she recalled that he had the students paint “apples and bottles, as almost all beginners do.”13 Committed to pursuing a career as an artist, Albizu was particularly inspired by Vicente’s collage works, which he began to make in 1949.14 Painting the paper first, then arranging it on paperboard, Vicente could work even more freely in collage than he could in other media. In the collage works, colors retreat and advance—as if

Esteban Vicente Collage with Black and Yellow, 1957 Collage and black chalk on paperboard 29 x 23 inches (71.1 x 58.4 cm) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So!a, Madrid

the yellows of Zurbarán’s lemons have detached themselves from their objects and appeared, like ghosts, in Vicente’s New York studio. The still life loosens, becoming tessellating fragments.

Vicente’s teaching offered a generation of students access to the blurry zone between color and object, between academic formalism and the almost magical way in which the canvas can become a dispositif of lived experience (both the immediate act of painting and the longer march of one’s personal history). In other words, Vicente gave his students the ability to pitch a color through time, so that the spring landscape of the present could nevertheless contain the greens of the Loyalist tanks, even if utterly transformed by time and place. * In the 1990s, nearing the end of his life, Vicente paints his garden. After years of exhibitions, softball games, and teaching positions, with the colors of the Prado, New York, and Puerto Rico in his memory, he looks out of his studio window into the garden of foxgloves, poppies, and daisies, and he assumes nothing. Like the grapefruit-cum-softball, each object, each flower, carries a color through the mind’s eye, collecting and discarding references along the way.

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In Space (1997), a wedge of negative space opens up within a pulsing field of soft orange. A year later, in Untitled #3 (1998), this same orange appears again, but with more agitated, even impressionistic brushwork, like clouds of ether behind which one can imagine a bright, white light. A blue circle floats at the center of Sin Titulo (1995), seeming to beckon the viewer while denying any set visual path.

In some cases, the cryptics of Vicente’s color are rendered more familiar by the inclusion of titles. The vague beginnings of a path emerge from the lower left corner of Spring I (1996), a directional marker leading the eye through a haze of blue-green foliage toward a gently sloping hill beyond. This left-to-right diagonal motion is echoed in Experience (1998), the cool tones of Spring I replaced by bold opaque yellows interrupted by splotches of green.

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And then, in Pylon (1999), it is as if the colors have begun to reattach themselves to the still-life object, straddling representation and abstraction, clear material reference and pure chromatic effect. “Pylon” is thus an apt title for this late painting, referring either to a monumental gate in an Ancient Egyptian temple or to the steel towers that hold up telephone wires. Light and color signal, literally, the sensations of the present, while evoking pasts both close by and increasingly distant. On a sunsoaked table in Vicente’s Bridgehampton home, one might see Zurbarán’s fruits.

Through Vicente’s small window, an ancient gateway. What exactly the colors hide or reveal depends, of course, on who’s looking.

Angela H. Brown is a writer and editor from Yonkers, NY. She is a PhD student in modern and contemporary art at Princeton University.

Endnotes 1. As with most sports stories, the details of this one differ depending on who’s telling it. Phyllis Braff, writing for the New York Times in 1999, states that the game took place in 1954 and has Willem de Kooning helping Elaine paint the grapefruit. (Phyllis Braff, “Madrid Museum Gives Bridgehamptonite a Room of His Own,” New York Times, March 21, 1999.)

Calvin Tomkins, in Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (2005) gets the story through curator/ editor Thomas B. Hess, who says the art critic Harold Rosenberg pitched the first grapefruit-cumsoftball, Vicente the second one, then Rosenberg the third, but that the last one was a coconut.

(Tomkins, 81-82).

Mary Gabriel, in Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown, 2018) mentions only Vicente’s pitch and gives Elaine de Kooning primary credit for both the prank and painting the grapefruit.

2. Elizabeth Frank, Esteban Vicente (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995), 24.

3. See Edward J. Sullivan’s interviews with the artist Susan Crile (a former student of Vicente’s) and with Elizabeth Frank in Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2011) 4. Frank, 52.

5. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 190.

6. Guilbaut, 11.

7. Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly (January–March 1937): 86.

8. In 1964, Vicente wrote: “No painting is completely separated from the others that came before or come after. The artist has to be part of something.

Art belongs in a traditional line that reaches back and will go on forever.” Esteban Vicente, “Painting Should Be Poor,” Location 1, no. 2 (Summer 1964): 72.

9. Frank, 24.

10. Daniel Haxall, “Esteban Vicente, National Identity, and the Borders of Collage,” in Shifting Borders, eds.

Reid Cooper, Luke Nicholson, Jean-François Bélisle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 96, 102.

11. Esteban Vicente, “Editor’s letters,” Art News 61, no. 10 (February 1963): 6.

12. See Edward J. Sullivan, “Interviews,” in Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2011).

13. Abigail McEwen, “Olga Albizu and the Borders of Abstraction,” American Art 29, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 90.

14. McEwen, 89.

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Instinctive, 1994 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

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Sin Titulo, 1995 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

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Spring I, 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

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Untitled, 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

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Untitled, 1996 Oil on canvas 50 x 42 inches 127 x 106.7 cm

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Space, 1997

Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Experience, 1998 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Forma Color, 1998

Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Untitled #3, 1998 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Color Luz, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Pylon, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Untitled, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

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Untitled, 1999 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

CHRONOLOGY 1903 Esteban Vicente is born on January 20 in Turégano, Spain, in the region of Castile y Léon. He is the third of six children of Toribio Vicente Ruiz and Sofia Pérez y Alvarez. His father, a Civil Guard officer, is also an amateur painter.

1904–1917 His father resigns from the Civil Guard to take up a post as a property administrator with the Banco de España in order to bring up his children in Madrid. Esteban studies at a Jesuit school. From the age of four, he accompanies his father on visits to the Prado Museum.

1918 Vicente enters the Military Academy but leaves a#er three months. He then enrolls in the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid at the age of fi#een. He studies sculpture there for three years.

1922–1928 Develops friendships with the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and members of Generation of 1927, an influential group of poets that included Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and Federico García Lorca. He also befriends the future film director Luis Buñuel, the writer and publisher Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and the painters Juan Bonafé, Francisco Bores, and Wladyslaw Jahl. He shares a studio on the Calle del Carmen with the American painter James Gilbert and their friendship continues until Gilbert’s death in the 1970s. He holds his first exhibition in 1928 with Bonafé at the Ateneo de Madrid.

1929 Goes to Paris. Lives in a hotel and later shares a studio with the painter Pedro Flores. Earns a living retouching photographs and working on stage sets at the Folies Bergère.

Visits Pablo Picasso at his studio on the rue La Boétie and participates in Le Salon des Surindépendants. Meets the young American Michael Sonnabend, who later becomes his art dealer in New York. Spends six months in London, where he visits the painter Augustus Johns and members of Johns’ circle.

1930–1934 He moves to Barcelona and through his dealers, Joan Merli and Montse Isern, exhibits at the Galeries Syra. Returns to Paris (1930-31), thanks to a grant from La Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios for study abroad. Meets the Surrealist painter Max Ernst through an English friend, Darcy Japp. Again exhibits in Le Salon des Surindépendants. Has solo exhibitions in Barcelona at Avinyó (1931), Syra (1931), Busquets (1934) and Catalònia (1934). Exhibits in Madrid in the salon of the Heraldo de Madrid (1934).

1935 In Barcelona, he marries Estelle Charney (Esther Cherniakofsky Harac), a young American studying at the Sorbonne. They spend a year on the island of Ibiza.

1936 Returns to Madrid in July at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Works in camouflage in the mountains near Madrid before leaving for America. Lives on Mine$a Lane in the Greenwich Village of New York City.

1937 His daughter Mercedes is born. Thanks to the painter and critic Walter Pach, he has his first solo exhibition in New York at the Kleemann Gallery. At the request of Fernando de los Ríos, the Spanish ambassador to the United States for the Republic, he works at the consulate in Philadelphia until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.

1939 Returns to New York. Has his second solo exhibition at the Kleemann Gallery.

1941 Participates in a group exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

1942–1946 He becomes an American citizen in 1942 and lives at 70 Grove Street in New York City. Teaches Spanish at the Dalton School and works as an announcer for Voice of America during World War II. His daughter, Mercedes, dies in 1943. Lives at 280 Hicks Street in Brooklyn and works in a

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studio at 43 Greenwich Street in Greenwich Village. He divorces Estelle Charney in 1945. He teaches painting at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan from 1945-1946.

1947–1948 Returns to New York. Lives and works at 138 Second Avenue. Forms friendships with the painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Barne$ Newman, and the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess. He marries the literary critic and educator María Teresa Babín in 1948.

1949 Teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and begins to work in collage.

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1950 Sets up a studio at 88 East 10th Street. His studio is on the same floor as de Kooning’s studio. Chosen by the critic Clement Greenberg and the art historian Meyer Shapiro for the exhibition Talent 1950 at the Kootz Gallery in New York. Participates in the Annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Has a solo show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. Establishes lasting friendships with the painters Balcomb Greene, Aristodemos Kaldis, Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Ma$er and Ad Reinhardt, and the sculptors David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, Philip Pavia, and George Spaventa.

1951 Helps organize and participates in the historic 9th Street exhibition. Included in the seminal work on the New York School by Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. Works daily in his studio and receives visits from Philip Guston, Earl Kerkham, and Landes Leitin, as well as from the art collector Ben Heller. He is chosen for the first group exhibition of the New York School that traveled internationally to France and Japan. He is later named director of summer courses at the Highfield Art School in Falmouth, Massachuse$s.

1953 Elaine de Kooning’s article “Vicente Paints a Collage” is published in Art News. Vicente has solo exhibitions at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Teaches during the summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Other teachers include the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, the composers Stefan Wolpe and John Cage, and the dancer Merce Cunningham. Among his students is the painter Dorothea Rockburne. He exhibits in several collective exhibitions throughout the United States.

1955 Has solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York, a gallery that also exhibits work by Giorgio Cavallon, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Reuben Nakian, and Jack Tworkov. Participates in several collective exhibitions.

1957 Has solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York. Accepts a teaching position at New York University, where he remains until 1964. Considered by Harold Rosenberg to be one of the “leaders in creating and disseminating a style...[that] constituted...the first art movement in the United States.”

1961 Divorces María Teresa Babín and marries Harriet Godfrey Peters. Lives in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood in New York.

1962 Awarded a grant from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University.

1964 Founding member of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, together with Mercedes Ma$er, Charles Cajori, and George Spaventa. He buys a Dutch colonial farmhouse in Bridgehampton, New York with his wife Harriet. He sets up a studio there and plants a flower garden.

1965 Artist-in-residence at Princeton University, where he has solo exhibition. Travels to Mexico.

1966 Travels to Morocco.

1967 The passing of his friend Ad Reinhardt deeply affects him.

1969 He is artist-in-residence at Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts.

Selected to exhibit in The New American Paintings and Sculpture: The First Generation, curated by William Rubin at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1972 John Ashbery writes in Art News that Vicente is “widely known and admired as one of the best teachers of painting in America.” Moves to West 67th Street in New York. Makes a second trip to Morocco.

1973 Teaches at Columbia University.

1975 He accompanies Harriet on a Jain pilgrimage to India.

1979 Has his first solo exhibition at the Gruenebaum Gallery in New York.

1982 Travels to Turkey with Harriet.

1983 Leaves his studio at 88 East 10th Street for a new studio on West 42nd Street in the heart of the theater district.

1984 Receives an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design in New York.

1985 Receives the Saltus Gold Medal from the National Academy of Design of New York and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le$ers as “one of the most gi#ed painters of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists,” with “a sensibility trained in Europe with the express purpose of opening the eyes and ears of Americans to the peculiar beauty around them.” Travels to Spain.

1987 Has a major retrospective in Madrid at the Fundación Banco Exterior de España, Esteban Vicente, Pinturas y Collages, 1925–1985, and also exhibits at the Yares Gallery in Sco$sdale, Arizona. Continues teaching at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and maintains contact with students, artists, and friends of all ages.

1988 Receives the Childe Hassam-Eugene Speicher Purchase Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le$ers in New York. He exhibits at the Galería Theo in Madrid and is included in eight group exhibitions, among them Aspects of Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object in Twentieth-Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

1989 Has a solo exhibition of recent oil paintings and collages at the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York.

1990 Has two solo exhibitions in Spain. Participates in the group exhibition, Drawing Highlights: Eric Fischl, Roy Lichtenstein, Esteban Vicente, at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York.

1991 Receives the Gold Medal in Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos and Queen So!a at the Prado Museum. Has a street named a#er him in Turégano, his hometown, in honor of his distinguished career as an artist. Teaches master classes at the Parsons School of Design and has six individual exhibitions, including one at the Centro de Exposiciones y Congresos in Zaragoza, Spain, and another at the Galerie Lina Davidov in Paris, France.

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College of Long Island University. Receives a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from the Guild Hall of East Hampton.

1994 His most recent works are shown at the Century Association of New York. Celebrates his ninety-first birthday with an exhibition of his latest works at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the company of past and present students. Travels to Spain to visit family members including his sister María, and a$ends the opening of his solo exhibition at the Galería Elvira González in Madrid. Five Decades of Painting opens at the Riva Yares Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1995 There is a major retrospective of his collages at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Centre Julio González, in Valencia, Spain. Hudson Hills Press publishes the monograph Esteban Vicente by Elizabeth Frank. Vicente has exhibitions of recent works at the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco$sdale, Arizona and the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. The Glenn Horowitz Gallery in East Hampton exhibits a selection of small collages and unique divertimentos.

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1992 Travels to Spain to a$end the opening of a solo show at the Palacio Lozoya in Segovia. Has three solo exhibitions in the United States: at the Berry-Hill Galleries in New York, the Louis Newman Galleries in Beverly Hills, and the Guild Hall of East Hampton. A selection of his work is chosen for the exhibition Paths to Discovery: The New York School, at the Baruch College Gallery in New York. He continues to teach master classes at the New York Studio School and the Parsons School of Design.

1993 Elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Le$ers at the age of ninety and awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Southampton

1996 The exhibition Esteban Vicente, Collages 1950-1994 travels from Valencia, Spain, to the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art at Marque$e University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Vicente has solo exhibitions of recent works at the Riva Yares Gallery in Santa Fe and the Galería Elvira González in Madrid. He returns to Spain with Harriet for a family visit. In the fall, he moves his studio to 1 West 67th Street, next door beside his apartment. He abandons the use of the spray gun.

1997 He paints twenty works in three months in his new studio.

Receives visits from friends William Maxwell and Susan Crile, among others. His longtime friend Willem de Kooning passes. Writes an article in de Kooning’s honor in the ABC of Madrid. Holds exhibitions at The Century Association in New York City, the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco$sdale, and Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. Restoration work is begun

on the future Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, sponsored by the Diputación Provincial de Segovia.

The Board of Trustees of the museum is created. Vicente and his wife make a formal donation of 148 works.

1998 The retrospective exhibition Esteban Vicente, Obras de 1950-1998 opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So!a in Madrid. The exhibition later travels to Santiago de Compostela (Auditorio de Galicia), Valladolid (Museo de la Pasión and Monasterio de Nuestra Señora del Prado) and Palma de Mallorca (Fundación Pilar I Joan Miró and Casal Solleric). He receives the Premio Castilla-León de las Artes.

He a$ends the opening of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, where a permanent collection of his artwork offers a broad view of his entire career. He continues supervising the work of his students at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, where he began teaching in 1964.

1999 At the age of 96, he continues painting every day. Travels to Spain with his wife, Harriet, where they are awarded the Gran Cruz de la Orden Civil de Alfonso X el Sabio for their contribution to art. Vicente is also named “Segoviano del Año” and awarded the Premio Arcale by the city of Salamanca.

Has a solo exhibition at the Riva Yares Gallery in Sco$sdale.

A permanent room devoted to his works opens at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So!a. All these honors, together with his participation in several exhibitions, mark the culmination of his recognition as an important figure in twentieth-century Spanish art.

2000 Spends the winter in Bridgehampton rather than New York City for the first time. Completes several drawings and sketches. Has solo exhibitions of drawings and collages at the Galería Elvira González and the Berry-Hill Galleries. In July, the magazine Review devotes its Lifetime Achievement Award issue to Esteban Vicente. In November, a retrospective exhibition, Esteban Vicente Esencial, is held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente.

2001 On January 10, the artist dies at his home in Bridgehampton shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. Complying with his wishes, his ashes are buried in the garden of his museum in Segovia. His death coincides with the homage that was planned for him previously by the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, of which he was a founding member and teacher for thirty-six years. The publication A Mis Soledades Voy, consisting of famous Spanish poems illustrated with engravings by Esteban Vicente, is exhibited. The publication, which he had worked on until shortly before his death, is also displayed at El Color Es la Luz: Esteban Vicente 1999–2000 in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente. The accompanying exhibition catalogue includes his writings on art. The exhibition later travels to the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, Spain, and the Monastery of Nuestra Señora del Prado in Valladolid, Spain. A retrospective of his work is held at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, in September.

Additionally, an exhibition devoted to various aspects of his work opens at the Monastery of Silos in Burgos, Spain, a space renowned for showing an important selection of contemporary Spanish art.

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SELECT COLLECTIONS

Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern, Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

American Academy of Arts and Le$ers, New York, NY

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Museo Colecciones del Instituto de Crédito Oficial, Madrid, Spain

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain

Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

Broad Art Center, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Spain

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

Brunnier Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University, Nashville, TN

National Academy Museum and School, New York, NY

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE

Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase, NY

Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina So!a, Madrid, Spain

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ

Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA

Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY

Guild Hall of East Hampton, East Hampton, NY

Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, Spain

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, HI Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse, NY

Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ESTEBAN!VICENTE 16 July – 28 August 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2020 Angela H. Brown Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-32-8 Cover: Untitled, (detail), 1999