Josep de TOGORES (1893 – 1970) Nude

Josep de Togores

A fresh, sensual watercolor by Josep de Togores depicting a languid nude woman.

Watercolour on paper
Signed and dated 1920 top right
Dimensions: 18 x 23 cm
With frame: 32.5 x 37.5 cm

Price: 3500 euros

Josep Togores i Llach, known as Josep De Togores, Catalan painter .

Josep de Togores’ work is highly emblematic of the figurative movement in Europe between the wars, and more specifically of Noucentisme – a specifically Catalan movement.

The female nude, a favorite subject for Josep de togores

The artist’s work is characterized by a clear framing of bodies, velvety, pearly terracotta modeling, a line that defines the body, and the serene placidity of faces.

Biography

A figurative painter who evolved into surrealism, this Catalan artist, too little known in France, had his moment of glory in the thirties.

The silence that pursued Togores was a bulwark all the firmer for having been, at first, perceived as magical.

Togores received his neoclassical training in Barcelona, before moving to Paris in 1919. In Paris, he discovered Raphaël, Ingres, Courbet and Cézanne at the Louvre. He created works in an incisive, powerful style very close to the hallucinatory realism of Derain, which caught the eye of the famous art dealer Kahnweiler. Once Kahnweiler had secured the necessary income, Togores continued his work, softening his style under the influence of his friend Maillol. In the sculptor’s studio, Togores shared the same models and multiplied his female nudes, which were appreciated as far away as Germany.
Attracted by the experiments of Masson and the automatic style, he was also encouraged by Kahnweiler to experiment with a more allusive figurative style, in keeping with a very Spanish expression of Surrealism. Togores left Paris in 1932, and settled permanently in Barcelona.

Numerous artistic influences: the “Noucentista” movement in Catalonia at the turn of the century, the New Objectivity of Germanist obedience, post-Cubist debates in post-war Paris, and the emergence of Surrealism, helped him develop his style. In 1929, under the pretext of a “world crisis”, Kahnweiler, the Cubists’ mythical dealer, abandoned him: “I took Togores penniless and unknown eleven years ago. I’m leaving him, but with money and fame.

Togores, torn between abstraction – via surrealist automatism – and the structuring need for a model, then retreated to Barcelona, bowing to commissions and permanently portraying high society.

In 1916, Cézanne’s influence can be seen in these “Landscapes”. In 1917, Picasso noticed his painting “Joan et la Pepeta”.

Later, from 1924-1925, figuration moved towards surrealism. Immotivated arabesques had long been visible in the hair. From 1928 to 1930, not a single figurative canvas. Pressed by the automatism of writing, he nevertheless avoided the orthodoxy of the Surrealists. Not far from Masson’s drawings, his nervous canvases fibrillate into white movements, an atomistic explosion of the flesh of yesteryear.

These works were baffling, claiming to be the impossible synthesis between classicism and abstract art, where cubism acted as an escort.

The work of Cécile Debray, the young curator of the Châteauroux museums, is to be commended, as she has produced a fine catalog raisonné. Among other things, it shows previously unseen canvases, absent from the recent retrospective in Barcelona.
Muriel Steinmetz (1998, Chateauroux exhibition)

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