A

lthough little
known in the
English-speaking
world, Antonio
López García
is easily Spain’s
most loved living
painter. A
stubborn perfectionist, he exhibits his work
only rarely – it can take him 20 years to
complete a picture – but over the decades,
his humane brand of realism has earned him
a devoted following, especially among the
younger generation of Spanish artists, who
greet this reticent, almost painfully shy
72-year-old with the sort of adulation usually
reserved for rock stars. López García’s
panoramic Madrid cityscapes, contemporary
masterpieces as remarkable for their
technical prowess as for their haunting sense
of place, have become emblems of Spain’s
modern identity and can be found, in poster
versions, adorning student dorm rooms
across the country.
All the more surprising, then, that when
Spain’s new national museum of 20th-
century art, the Reina Sofía, unveiled the
installation of its permanent collection in
1992, López García and the entire realist
school from which he had sprung were
pointedly omitted from the display. The
Reina Sofía’s curators had opted, reasonably
enough, to define 20th-century Spanish art
in terms of the internationally acclaimed
masters of modernism’s heroic period, such

National
as Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Juan Gris.
Celebrating Spain’s post-Franco-era
reintegration into the world community,
they also leavened the installation with such
contemporary artists as Antoni Tàpies,
Eduardo Chillida and Antonio Saura, who
had gained substantial foreign followings by

treasure
Revered in his native Spain, Antonio López García
is little known outside it. An exhibition in Boston
could change that, writes Jonathan Lopez.
exhibiting abroad and working in a self-
consciously avant-garde manner. The
stay-at-home López García, however, whose
fame was strictly a local affair and whose
desire to depict the circumstances of his
everyday existence may have seemed – to
high-modernist eyes – a somewhat provincial
project, was unceremoniously snubbed.
This led to uproar in the press, and the
curators – who found themselves accused
by editorialists of bias, blindness and gross
condescension – were soon obliged to relent.
Sensibly, they agreed to set aside a room at
the Reina Sofía for Spanish realism. What’s

Copyright Apollo, June 2008

98 APOLLO

more, a year later, the museum mounted a
90-work retrospective of López García’s
career – a blockbuster event that had, in fact,
been planned well before the contretemps
over the permanent collection – thus
dramatically placing the imprimatur of
official recognition on the artist’s growing
reputation as a national treasure.
The exhibition at Boston’s Museum of
Fine Arts is only about half the size of the
1993 Reina Sofía show, but, importantly, it is
López García’s first museum retrospective
in the us and only his second outside Spain.
Ably organised by the mfa’s curator of
contemporary art, Cheryl Brutvan, it gives
the non-Spanish public a welcome intro-
duction to this serious and significant artist,
whose intense relationship to his local
environment has produced a vision of the
world that transcends mere regionalism and
Copyright Apollo, June 2008
EXHIBITIONS
The works illustrating this review are by
Antonio López García (b. 1936). All photos:
Francisco Fernández, Unidad Móvil.
1 Portrait of María, 1972. Graphite on paper
laid on board, 70 x 53.3 cm. Private collection
2 La terraza de Lucio, 1962-90. Oil on board,
172 x 207 cm. Private collection
speaks eloquently to a universal audience.
On entering the exhibition, the visitor is
immediately confronted by one of López
García’s most iconic works, La terraza de
Lucio (1962-90) – or ‘Lucio’s Balcony’ – a
scene of Madrid’s urban sprawl glimpsed
over the stuccoed parapet of a modest
rooftop garden (Fig. 2). With his talent for
finding magic in the quotidian, López García
captures the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight
as it sparkles with incongruous majesty on
the most prosaic of 1950s housing blocks.
The work’s composition is at once cerebral
and hypnotic: the blank wall in the fore-
ground radically obstructs our view of what
lies beyond, but the receding diagonal of the
parapet’s leftmost edge inexorably draws our
gaze into the image, situating us, like the
artist, as detached observers in the heart of
the metropolis. La terraza de Lucio, whose
surface is a palimpsest of accumulated
alterations and adjustments, began life in
1962 as a group portrait of López García’s
friends, posed outdoors on the balcony. As
the project dragged on, the friends eventually
moved away, but the artist continued to work
on the piece in fits and starts until 1990,
obsessively scraping down and repainting,
revising the subject, altering the composition
and drastically increasing the size of the
support by adding extra boards – the seams
of which he has left exposed, a telling
EXHIBITIONS
3 Antonio López García in his studio, 2005.
4 A preparatory cast for Night, part of the
memorial by López García to the victims of
the 2004 terrorist bombs in Madrid, to be
installed at Atocha train station
reminder that he conceives his art not as a
demonstration of skill but as a journey of
discovery.
López García works so slowly and with
such painstaking care that his pictures often
take on a brooding, even melancholic quality
– as if he were recording reality’s sights
anticipating the nostalgia that he might feel
for them in the future. His 1972 portrait of
his daughter María, for instance, looks
almost like a bid to preserve childhood in
amber (Fig. 1). An exquisitely nuanced study
of light and shade, this drawing can hold its
own on a wall hung with oils, but the gravity
and impact of the image derive more from
its elegiac mood than from its masterful
execution. However precisely López García
may document María’s features, the little girl
must inevitably grow up: perception is
temporal, experience evanescent.
Taking this insight as his theme, the
Spanish director Victor Erice filmed a
feature-length documentary, in 1992,
chronicling López García’s efforts to depict
a quince tree as it blossoms and bears fruit.
The film’s title, El sol del membrillo, translates
literally as ‘quince sunlight’ – a phrase
connoting, in Spanish, a specific time of
year and a specific state of mind. The quince
ripens in late summer, when the Castilian
sunshine is especially warm and intense, but
this rich, radiant light carries with it the
harbinger of autumn’s impending chill. As
Erice’s film unfolds, López García enters
into an increasingly tortuous battle with
both the quince tree and time itself; so
quickly does the fruit ripen that the artist is
compelled to chart the changes in his motif
day by day, using guide wires to measure the
movement of the drooping branches, even
Copyright Apollo, June 2008
100 APOLLO
dabbing paint on the multiplying, tumescent Preliminary versions have been installed
quinces to gauge their position relative to the on either side of the mfa’s entrance, to
boughs. Valiantly although he struggles, profound effect. At 10 feet high, these
López García has no choice but to abandon innocent faces, carrying with them the hope
the picture as the growing season draws to a of new life, will surely bear eloquent witness
close. He remains, however, poignantly to the tragic events at Atocha. Who but
undaunted, a man who judges himself by his López García could commemorate that
ardent attachment to his craft rather than by darkest day in Madrid’s recent history with
his passing successes or failures. El sol del such sobriety, humanity and grace?
membrillo won the Jury Award at Cannes.
López García’s oeuvre as a painter is strong Jonathan Lopez’s biography of the Dutch art
not only in figure studies and landscapes, forger Han van Meegeren, The Man Who
but also in interior scenes and still lifes, the Made Vermeers, will be published by
Conejo desollado – or ‘Skinned Rabbit’ – of Harcourt in September.
1972 being an especially telling example of
the latter, with its sensitive but unsettling ‘Antonio López García’, Museum of Fine Arts,
portrayal of a freshly killed animal. Boston, 13 April-27 July (+1 617-267-9300).
Additionally, the Boston show includes Catalogue by Cheryl Brutvan, isbn 97808784-
several of the artist’s sculptures. Male and 67334 (paper), $24.95 (mfa Publications).
female figures – some carved, others
modelled – they strive for the noble
simplicity of the pre-Classical Greeks but
fall, in most cases, somewhat short of the
mark, betraying a tendency towards
generalisation and inertia. An exception must
be made, however, for the tiny, tender
portrait busts of López García’s infant
grandchildren. The Spanish government has
commissioned two of these ‘baby heads’ to
be cast in bronze on a monumental scale and
placed outside Madrid’s Atocha train station
as a memorial to the victims of the 2004
terrorist bombings (Figs 3 and 4).
5 Sink and Mirror, 1967. Oil on canvas,
98 x 84 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection