COLLECTION / 1945-1989 / Spain / Eugenio F. Granell

70 works of art and documents.

Eugenio Fernández Granell (La Coruña, 1912–Madrid, 2001) was a surrealist poet, writer and painter, as well as a formally trained violinist. In Madrid during the Second Spanish Republic he met Benjamin Péret and Wifredo Lam, joining the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), of which he became a member in 1935. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he became the director of the POUM’s newspaper, El combatiente rojo. After the war, Granell was wanted by both the fascist army and the Stalinists, and so, in 1939, he took up exile in France, where he was reunited with Péret and Lam, before later emigrating to the Dominican Republic, where he met André Breton. His exile continued in Guatemala (1946), Puerto Rico (1950) and New York City (1958) where he was associated with Marcel Duchamp and where he enhanced his practice as a surrealist painter. Breton included Granell in the second surrealist generation together with artists such as Matta, Gorky and Giacometti.

His painting is characterised by uncertainty, hybridisation, encounters and metamorphosis. Prolific output as a surrealist painter was complemented by his teaching work as a professor of Spanish literature at Brooklyn College (1960–1982) and his work as a writer of novels and essays. He returned to Spain for good in 1985 where he received numerous prizes, the most notable being the Premio de Artes Plásticas de la Comunidad de Madrid (1989), the Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes of the Government of Spain (1994) and the Medalla de Oro del Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid (2000).

Archivo Lafuente holds over 50 documents and works by/about Granell including catalogues, invitations, leaflets, magazines, books about him and his work, books written and illustrated by the artist himself (El clavo [1967], Lo que sucedió... [1968], etc.), photographs (such as the famous one taken in Santo Domingo in 1941 by Conrado in which Granell appears together with André Breton), and, primarily, original works (drawings, paintings, sculptures) such as untitled paintings and drawings from different periods in his production (1948, 1952, 1963, 1979, etc.) and the sculpture Caballo marino from 1974.

 



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