Joaquín Peinado

Estate of the artist
Purchased from the above by the present owner in 1985

Turin, Palazzo Belle Arti, Peintres d'aujourd'hui: France - Italie, 1952

The canvas has not been lined. There are fine lines of craquelure throughout the composition and some scattered small spots of surface dirt which are not distractive to the naked eye. Ultra-violet light reveals small spots of retouching along the lower left corner, in the upper left corner and one spot towards the upper centre left framing edge. The work is otherwise in good condition and ready to hang. Presented in a narrow wooden frame.
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Painted in 1952 the present work exemplifies the neo-cubist aesthetic for which Peinado became renowned. Considered a successor of Cézanne and spiritual son of Picasso, Peinado was one of the most elegant painters of the 'Spanish School' in Paris.

Joaquín Peinado initially planned to become a merchant, before abandoning his studies to enter the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He eventually became a disciple of Cecilio Plá and Julio Romero de Torres. In 1922 he won the El Paular prize for painting and, a year later, settled in Paris to further his studies, where he befriended Picasso, Luis Buñuel, Christian Zervos, Pancho Cossío and Francisco Bores, among others. Peinado studied at the Academies Ranson, Colarossi and La Grande Chaumière, while exploring the new concept of cubist painting, an aesthetic he was fully to embrace in his subsequent works.

In 1924 Peinado took part in the exhibitions of the Indépendants, Surindépendants and the Salon d'automne; the following year he participated in the Exhibition of the Iberian Artists Society, in the rooms of the Madrileñan Retreat. In May 1926 he travelled to Amsterdam to take part in the staging of Manuel de Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro (Maese Pedro´s altarpiece), directed by Luis Buñuel. In 1929, Peinado exhibited in two important group exhibitions of avant-garde art in Spain: the Exhibition  of Paintings and Sculptures of Spanish artists resident in Paris, in the Botanic Garden of Madrid; and the Regional Exhibition of Modern Art, in la Casa de los Tiros (House of Shots) in Granada. In the 1940s and 1950s he exhibited in Prague, Brno and Mexico, before securing a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Spanish Contemporary Art in Madrid in 1969.

Peinado's works are considered essential for the revision of contemporary Spanish art and the so-called Paris School precisely due to their neo-cubist character. The development of his artistic career led him to occupy an important position in the Escuela de Paris. From the late 1940s onwards his style became more individual as a result of multiple experiments with geometry and abstraction in which, however, the model and the strictness of his draughtsmanship remained very important, as evident in the present work.