Bull, by Óscar Domínguez.
Pencil and Indian ink on Japan paper.
France.
ca. 1950.
↕ 56 cm ; ↔ 44 cm.
Signed by the artist, this pencil and Indian ink drawing on Japan paper is part of a series of drawings and paintings on the theme of bullfighting that Tenerife-born Óscar Domínguez undertook in the late 1940s. Santa Cruz de Tenerife is famous for its bullfights.
Many drawings and engravings by Óscar Domínguez are exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée national d'Art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco.
Óscar Domínguez’s first encountered with the Parisian art scene took place in 1927, as went with his father, a rich banana exporter from the Canary Islands, on a business trip to Paris. He was self-taught as an artist. He moved to Paris in 1929 and returned to the Canaries in 1933, where he organised a small Surrealist exhibition. In 1934, he reached out to André Breton, returned to Paris and officially joined the Surrealist group. It is said that he invented the decalcomania.
Sources
René Passeron, Histoire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1968.
Cyril Brian Morris, Surrealism and Spain. 1920-1936, Cambridge, 1972.
Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oxford, 2009.
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les Avant-gardes artistiques. 1918-1945, Paris, 2017.
