Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works.
BURNING RED
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: José Guerrero (Granada, 1914–Barcelona, 1991)
Title: Burning Red
Year: 1960
Technique: oil on canvas
Size: 133 x 152.5 cm
In 1958 Betty Parsons organised José Guerrero’s most important exhibition at her gallery. With black a common feature of all the works, the show was entitled The Presence of Black. For Guerrero, this was an autobiographical colour associated with his native Andalusia, Granada nights and the dyed clothing of his childhood due to a death in the family. So much so, when he arrived in New York and discovered the black oval shapes in Robert Motherwell’s paintings—with whose Elegies to the Spanish Republic his own work has been related—and the energetic black lines employed by Franz Kline, he felt that they were taking away his black. The presence of black masses applied with a marked gesture became a recurring motif in his work. A fine example is this canvas, which formed part of another of the artist’s shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery, held in 1963. Although the title of the work alludes to the use of red rather than black—two distinctly Lorquian colours—in reality it is the black masses that enhance the effect of the red ones.
Burning Red also featured in the artist’s solo show at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York, and after its presentation at the Schiller & Bodo Gallery in that city it was purchased by Maurice Solomon. The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson acquired the painting from that collection at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on 3 December 2021 (Lot 129).