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| Ángeles Santos obituary | Ángeles Santos obituary |
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| The painter Ángeles Santos, who has died aged 101, was often referred to as a Spanish Rimbaud. By the age of 19 she had completed her best work. Then she stopped. Unlike the poet, she later took up her art again, though in a completely different style. | The painter Ángeles Santos, who has died aged 101, was often referred to as a Spanish Rimbaud. By the age of 19 she had completed her best work. Then she stopped. Unlike the poet, she later took up her art again, though in a completely different style. |
| In 1929 her painting Un Mundo (A World) became the sensation of the IXth autumn salon in Madrid. Well-known intellectuals visited her home in the city of Valladolid, among them the poet Lorca, who exclaimed of her works: "They look like Picassos." At the Xth autumn salon the following year, Santos had a room of her own, and in 1931 a solo exhibition in Paris. But she had already stopped painting. She had a nervous breakdown, ran away from home and spent six weeks in a sanatorium. She destroyed paintings. She continued to allow her surviving ones to be shown, but herself rejected them. | |
| When asked 70 years later how it was that a young woman in a provincial city who had never seen modern painting could produce work that invited comparison with Dalí or Picasso, she replied: "It seems I was born a painter. I was stimulated by the things I read." Thus Un Mundo, in which starlight illuminates the rectangular world and the mothers of the spirits play music on the edge of the canvas, was inspired by lines by the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. | |
| Critics place her early work between expressionism and surrealism. Her paintings were often dark and anguished, though others were intense, but calm, portraits of family members. She said later: "At that time I didn't exist. My life was painting. I thought of nothing else … I worked fast, often completing a painting in one session." Though relatively untutored, she learned as fast as she worked. Her painting is not ingenuous: it always seems the work of a mature artist. | Critics place her early work between expressionism and surrealism. Her paintings were often dark and anguished, though others were intense, but calm, portraits of family members. She said later: "At that time I didn't exist. My life was painting. I thought of nothing else … I worked fast, often completing a painting in one session." Though relatively untutored, she learned as fast as she worked. Her painting is not ingenuous: it always seems the work of a mature artist. |
| Another famous painting, La Tertulia (The Discussion Group, 1929), like El Mundo now held in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, shows four women smoking, slouching, reading and talking freely. In a world where women were not meant to paint, it is a cry for freedom, a feminist response to the cafe discussions of bohemian men she had known in Valladolid and perhaps a clue to the pressures that made her abandon painting. | Another famous painting, La Tertulia (The Discussion Group, 1929), like El Mundo now held in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, shows four women smoking, slouching, reading and talking freely. In a world where women were not meant to paint, it is a cry for freedom, a feminist response to the cafe discussions of bohemian men she had known in Valladolid and perhaps a clue to the pressures that made her abandon painting. |
| Born in Portbou, a small Catalan town near the French border, Santos was the eldest of eight children. Her father was a customs official and the family led a peripatetic life. In 1924 she was sent to a convent boarding school in Seville, where the mother superior urged her parents to foster her drawing and painting skills. This they did and in 1927, when the family settled in Valladolid, she had daily painting classes before school. She exhibited locally before sending her 2.9 m x 3.1 m canvas, Un Mundo, to the 1929 autumn salon. | |
| In 1933, Santos settled in Barcelona and in January 1936 married the painter Emili Grau. That July, the civil war erupted and the couple left Spain for France. In 1937, Santos returned alone, to live with her parents in Canfranc (in the Pyrenees), where she gave birth to her only child. By the 1940s, back in Barcelona, she was painting again, but curiously, despite her husband's absence, it was under the influence of his rather bland impressionist style. Some of these landscapes and still lifes are impressive, but are as nothing compared with the ambition and passion of her teenage work. It is hard to grasp the split in her art: between the tortured originality of her adolescent masterpieces and the conventional painting of the rest of her life. | In 1933, Santos settled in Barcelona and in January 1936 married the painter Emili Grau. That July, the civil war erupted and the couple left Spain for France. In 1937, Santos returned alone, to live with her parents in Canfranc (in the Pyrenees), where she gave birth to her only child. By the 1940s, back in Barcelona, she was painting again, but curiously, despite her husband's absence, it was under the influence of his rather bland impressionist style. Some of these landscapes and still lifes are impressive, but are as nothing compared with the ambition and passion of her teenage work. It is hard to grasp the split in her art: between the tortured originality of her adolescent masterpieces and the conventional painting of the rest of her life. |
| In 1962 Santos was reunited with her husband in Paris and returned with him to Spain, where they lived between Madrid and the Catalan town of Sitges, renowned for its painters enjoying the fine light of the sea, until Grau's death in 1975. From the 1990s her work attracted increasing interest, with studies and exhibitions, notably a 2001 retrospective in Valladolid and an exhibition in Bilbao in 2003. | In 1962 Santos was reunited with her husband in Paris and returned with him to Spain, where they lived between Madrid and the Catalan town of Sitges, renowned for its painters enjoying the fine light of the sea, until Grau's death in 1975. From the 1990s her work attracted increasing interest, with studies and exhibitions, notably a 2001 retrospective in Valladolid and an exhibition in Bilbao in 2003. |
| In her last years she lived in Madrid with her son, the painter Julián Grau Santos, who survives her. | In her last years she lived in Madrid with her son, the painter Julián Grau Santos, who survives her. |
| • Ángeles Santos Torroella, painter, born 7 November 1911; died 3 October 2013 | • Ángeles Santos Torroella, painter, born 7 November 1911; died 3 October 2013 |
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