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Esteban Vicente (American, b. Spain, 1903-2001)
Interior Landscape, 1987
Oil on canvas, 35 x 60 in.
Gift of the Estate of Esteban Vicente. 2003.5
Esteban Vicente was raised in Madrid and attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, where Salvador Dalí was a fellow student. Vicente traveled extensively between Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris before immigrating to New York in 1936. The post-World War I New York art scene provided the perfect environment for Vicente's artistic growth, and by the 1940s, he abandoned representational subject matter for pure abstractions. Vicente became a core member of The New York School, and with fellow Abstract Expressionists, he participated in the seminal Ninth Street Show and frequented the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village to exchange ideas.
Vicente abstained from creating emotionally constructed compositions like his contemporaries, who were inspired by the Surrealists' automatism. Instead, he carefully arranged his compositions based on color and form, structuring each individual work as a facet of his overall oeuvre. Vicente explored various possibilities with pigments by staining his canvases and experimenting with different color combinations. Until the mid-1980's, he produced large-scale, collage-like paintings in which patches of color visually advance and recede within the composition.
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