Antonio Saura - Julieta (Giulietta)

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Antonio Saura (Spanish, 1930-1998), Julietta (Giuletta), 1960, oil on canvas, bequest of Alexander and Henrietta W. Hollaender, 1992.192

Although he would have preferred to render more agreeable women, Antonio Saura felt he could project Julieta and other “ladies” of this extended series only as raw, fierce, and bestial archetypes. After several years’ Parisian interaction with Surrealism, Tachism, and American Abstract Expressionism, the self-taught Saura became a leading exponent of Art Informel (Unformed art) under Francisco Franco’s still brutally repressive dictatorship. He completed this painting the year he founded Madrid’s El Paso (The Step), abstractionists intent to promote new and unfettered expression. He employed chance to conceive Julieta in his typical ascetic palette:  slashed gray breasts, torso, and facial slabs emerge from the untouched white against a brown ground; black, gold, and brown score the frenzied, dripping, and gaping face condensed by a hair-sprouting rectangle. Hallucinatory, pulsating, and destructive, Julieta recalls Spanish wounding and wounded women from Goya’s corrupt royalty to Picasso and Miró’s anguished sufferers.

Barbara C. Buenger

Catalogue
Antonio Saura - Julieta (Giulietta)