LANDSCAPE. OIL ON CANVAS. FRAU, JOSÉ (SPAIN, 1898-1976).

Landscape. Oil on canvas. FRAU, José (Spain, 1898-1976). Signed (lower right area). José María Isidro Frau y Ruiz (Vigo, 15 May 1898 – Madrid, 24 March 1976) was a Spanish painter and academic, appreciated for his landscapes and for being part of the School of Painters of El Paular (created by Royal Decree on 22 February 1918, within the Chair of Landscape that the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando established in 1845 as part of the official teaching of its pedagogical programs in art; it ceased to operate in 1936 and was recovered in 2018). Known as José Frau, he began his pictorial training in Huelva with Antonio de la Torre and Eugenio Hermoso Huelva. In 1916 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and, from 1917, he participated in the National Exhibitions of Madrid, showing his work also in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mexico City, New York, etc. He travelled through South America in 1947, settling in Mexico three years later and returning to Spain in 1966. His work is preserved in notable private collections and institutions such as the Museo Municipal Quiñones de León (Spain), the Museo de Bellas Artes de La Coruña, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, etc. He has been considered one of the representatives of the equivalent of “magical realism” in Spain. His pictorial work is based on figurative premises and a naturalistic and symbolic formation. He participated in the process of renewal of Spanish painting in the twenties and thirties, evolving towards a post-impressionist style. Later he focused on a calm post-Cézanne modernity in which he portrayed landscapes with figures recreated in fantastic and magical environments. During the post-war years he returned to a looser and more nervous brushstroke. In his later works he used a Fauvist chromatic palette in which greens, blues, earth tones and highly contrasting blacks predominated, while at the same time a progressive process of stylization occurred in his works in addition to the loss of the prominence of the human figure.

· Size: 91x3x71 cms. int: 79x59 cms.