Splendid painting by Josep Mompou, an important Catalan artist. This work, The balcony and the rain, was made in 1932 in the city of Barcelona. On the back of the painting is the date given by the artist himself (Barcelona, 1932). Mompou was one of the great Catalan painters of the twenties and thirties... a son of his time, he lived the last stage of Catalan Modernism fused with the decadentism of the turn of the century, as well as the airs of war.
The painting represents a view of the city captured from his balcony. The artist draws with lines the balcony cut out in the lower area, as well as the wooden shutter on the left side. The attention of the work falls on the car that crosses the avenue during the rain, as well as the light that is understood to be provided by a street lamp.
The combined or opposing influences of Cézanne and Van Gogh, of the Fauves and Cubism, are totally assimilated and transformed by the vision and lyricism of the painter, who is first and foremost and essentially a Catalan painter. However, what dominates and characterizes most strongly this work, and his artistic production of maturity, is the use of color, which directly precedes the fauve technique. The juxtaposition of pure tones in contrasting relationships, the free play of color used for its own expressive value and free of local tone are, without the slightest doubt, characteristics of Fauvism.
In the lower right part appears his signature "Mompou".
About the artist and his work
Josep Mompou Dencausse (Barcelona, 1888 - 1968) began exhibiting at the age of nineteen, in 1907, at the V International Art Exhibition of Barcelona. Practically self-taught, Mompou only received basic drawing lessons as a child, at the academy of Joaquim Torres Canosa.
He grew up in a cultured and Frenchified environment, his mother had a passion for France and his father traded in the sale of bells, which led him to have direct contact with the country. From a very young age he developed a dense and particular artistic personality, as did his brother, the famous pianist and composer Federico Mompou.
He combined his vocation and artistic career with the trade inherited from his family. Thanks to this, he traveled extensively, which allowed him to get to know other cultures and to incorporate nuances to his artistic vision.
Throughout his artistic projection he was closely linked to the Dalmau Galleries, the art gallery most open to the avant-garde in Catalonia in the first third of the twentieth century. He became a very synthetic painter, refined and rooted to the Fauve aesthetics, as his vivid colors reveal.
Historiographically, Mompou's most revealing years in his artistic life, where his work shows more of his personal intensity, making him a figure of weight both nationally and internationally: the period between 1925 and 1934. The time frame runs between the last exhibition at the Dalmau house in 1925 and the onset of tuberculosis in 1934. In these golden years, he flourished as an artist, painting some 150 works: seascapes, still lifes, portraits and urban views of the city of Paris or Barcelona, as in this work. Because of its size and its emblematic character of the "happy twenties" we must highlight his large oil painting Dancing (1929, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía).
The removal of a lung interrupted his career in 1934, which he could not fully resume until the early forties, after spending the Civil War in a Swiss sanatorium. During the post-war period he continued to paint.
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