ANTONI CLAVE; painter, sculptor & illustrator
Hyfler/Rosner
07 September 2005
The work:
http://www.artregister.com/rudzinoff_catalog/clave_reine.html
http://www.postershop.com/Clave-Antoni/Clave-Antoni-Composition-IV-4704795.html
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/tem/tem349.jpg
Antoni Clavé, painter, sculptor and illustrator: born
Barcelona 5 April 1913; (one son deceased); died St Tropez
30 August 2005.
The eminent Catalan artist Antoni Clavé declared in a 1994
interview that, at the age of four, he was asked the
question fondly posed by every proud parent: "What are you
going to be when you are grown up?" Without hesitation, the
little boy announced: "I'm going to draw pictures." His
rather baffled working-class parents never forgot it,
especially whenever he was punished at school for scrawling
sketches in his exercise books instead of sums and
sentences. Fortunately, at the age of 13, he was
unexpectedly accepted as a trainee student at the Escuela
Superior de Bellas Artes de San Jorge in Barcelona.
Clavé had already started work as an apprentice house
painter, so he could attend only evening classes. But he was
still determined to make his mark as an artist, and from the
outset he felt confident that he would succeed, even though
in those grim times it was almost impossible to make a
living from painting pictures. On Sundays, he haunted the
art galleries: his favourite artist was Goya, whose Los
Caprichos he was to adapt for the ballet of that name in
1946 for the Ballets des Champs Elysées. But by the age of
17 he was adding to his housepainter's meagre wages by
creating his first film posters and magazine publicity
sketches until, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out and
in 1937 Clavé enlisted for two years on the Republican side.
With the victory of Franco's Nationalists he escaped from
Catalonia, making his way across the Pyrenees to France,
where he was to live in exile ever after.
After a distressing period of detention at a notorious
refugee prison camp, Prats-de-Mollo, he was able to reach
Paris. There he was lucky to find temporary jobs as a
painter and decorator and then as a poster artist. At the
same time, he was developing his own style in landscapes and
portraiture, influenced largely by the French Impressionists
and Post-Impressionists. "In 1942," he confessed later, "I
even painted a portrait of my mother that was just a pale
imitation of Vuillard."
He began experimenting with techniques borrowed from a
variety of sources - Cubism, Surrealism and collages using
supports like wallpaper, wood and metal which led to
experiments with lithography. He became a well-known
illustrator, specialising at first in fine books with
Spanish themes like Prosper Mérimée's Lettres d'Espagne
(1943) and Carmen (1946). He followed these with Pushkin's
Queen of Spades (1946), Voltaire's Candide (1948) and
Rabelais's Gargantua (1953). In 1949 he designed both
costumes and scenery for Roland Petit's Ballet des
Champs-Elysées, and Ballabile for Sadler's Wells Ballet.
Clavé's early exhibitions had not been successful: at first,
he did not sell even one drawing. Then he was commissioned
by the Opéra de Paris, which eventually led to his creation
of the scenery and costumes for the triumphant 1962
production of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart at the
Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. The publicity from these
successes, and the close friendship he had formed with his
fellow Catalan Pablo Picasso, helped him to improve his
serious painting and to find sympathetic dealers and buyers.
On "Jour J" (D-Day) in 1944, Clavé and a group of Catalan
exiles were in Picasso's studio talking about art when
Clavé, very depressed, caught the Master's attention.
"What's the matter?" he asked Clavé. "Is the paint not
flowing well just now?" And Clavé gloomily replied: "No,
it's not going well at all." Picasso responded, "Do you
think that only happens to you? There are days when I have
the same problems as you!"
It was the beginning of Clavé's preoccupation with
sculpture, which he had briefly studied at art school, but
that did not emerge in full flower until 1960. Unlike most
sculptors, he had no assistants; he did everything himself,
and he abhorred the making of trial maquettes for his mostly
large-scale works: he felt that such a method was cheating,
and led to facile and mechanical reproductive work. "Mere
enlargements," as he said.
But the sculptor's art taught Clavé when to stop when making
a painting or a collage. It was again Picasso who made him
realise that he had still not learnt when to stop working on
a new painting: indeed, Clavé himself admitted that some of
his works started off as landscapes and ended as still-life.
"You wear the subject out," Picasso told him, and these
simple words acted as a revelation on Clavé. He never
planned the course of a subject, saying: "If I knew in
advance what I was going to do, I could not begin."
My first sight of a Clavé work was in his memorable 1972
show in Tokyo, "Thirty Years of Painting". If it was a
revelation to me, it was an even greater one to the young
Japanese who swarmed to see it. The show was such a success,
both artistically and financially, that another, first seen
in Cologne in 1973, was opened in the same year at Umeda in
Osaka, Japan. Since then, Clavé's works, both painting and
sculpture, have toured the world: but he was little shown in
Britain.
He returned in 1990 to Barcelona, where he had been
commissioned to make a large-scale sculpture commemorating
his native city's Universal Exhibition of 1888. That great
work dominates the Plaza de la Ciudadela, now a memorial to
Barcelona's absent son.
James Kirkup