During the 1940's, Oscar Domínguez’s paintings were strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso with whom the artist had become friends while living in Paris. Certainly, the influence of
Picasso’s Guernica (1937) can be detected in the angular and dynamic forms of the present composition. The first owner of
Batalla or La Vole Lion (The Battle or The Fighting Lion) was the leader of the Surrealist group André Breton. Breton’s fundamentally important role in the course of twentieth century art began with his friendship of Guillaume Apollinaire, who introduced him to Picasso, de Chirico and Derain. Throughout the 1930s in Paris and much of the 1940s in America, Breton acted as a critic and champion of these artists and his passionate avowal of their art led them to international recognition and acclaim. Understandably this also ensured that Breton possessed a diverse and truly exceptional collection of their best works, much of which has found its way into museums across the world, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Breton celebrated, among many others, the energised quality of Domínguez’s compositions in his 1939 Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste. Domínguez, he described, was a painter who could, 'with a movement of the arm as unstudied and quick as that of a window cleaner or the worker who, with the house finished, signs his name in blanc d'Espagne, use his brush to add diverse colours, stroke by stroke, and succeed in defining new spaces – barely marked or hinted at – that transport us into those realms of pure fascination that have remained unvisited since, as children, we contemplated colour images of meteors in books' (André Breton quoted in La Part du jeu et du rêve. Oscar Domínguez et le surréalisme 1906-1957 (exhibition catalogue), Musée Cantini, Marseille, 2005, p. 199, translated from the French).