Un mundo (A World)

Un mundo (A World), by the young and, at the time, unknown painter Ángeles Santos, reverberated through the Salón de Otoño (Autumn Salon) in Madrid in 1929. The monumental painting, standing at 3 x 3 metres, was executed in Valladolid by an artist with no first-hand knowledge of artistic creations in Europe in that period. It mesmerised the intellectuals of the time, while Ramón Gómez de la Serna would write: “At the Salón de Otoño, submerged in the Retiro, among the debris of leaves and mud, a revelation has emerged: the revelation of a seventeen-year-old girl. Ángeles Santos appears as the painting’s Saint Teresa, listening to the doves and stars which dictate the feel her paintbrushes must have”.
Santos made a surprising, original and modern work built around references taken from her immediate surroundings and from avant-garde magazines and publications. The most important of these was a book by Franz Roh, which, with its illustrations, gave her insight into the work of artists such as Joan Miró and members of so-called New Objectivity from Germany, with which Un mundo shares a common thread. 

Raúl Martínez Arranz

 

https://gigapixel.museoreinasofia.es/en/un-mundo-angeles-santos/#2/14.2…