Vázquez Díaz. Colecciones del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

As evidenced by the pieces in the exhibition, Vázquez Díaz is one of the examples that Spanish art is structured on during the first half of the century. In his paintings resounding volumes are combined with the hard lines coming from both cubist grammar and the inheritance of a certain value from a pictorial tradition, such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán. His qualities as a portrait painter make him the artist who defines best the faces and characters of poets, writers, historians, artists, actresses and bullfighters who have passed through and marked the French and Spanish cultural and intellectual life over the decades. In this way, his work shows such important figures as: María Guerrero, Miguel de Unamuno, Henri Barbusse, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Manuel Moreno, Anatole France, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marcelino Mendéndez Pidal, Ramiro de Maeztu, Javier Winthuysen, Dimitri Tsapline, Sunyer, Adriano del Valle, Frascuelo and his crew, Lagartijo and Mazzantini, among others.

The exhibition also includes examples Vázquez Díaz’s large project of 1929 and 1930: the frescoes for the convent of La Rabida known as Poema del Descubrimiento. The preparatory drawings and the fresco Fragmento de los marineros reveal the stylistic closeness and aesthetic consciousness of the painter to a language that, since the New Objectivity movement, is moving towards a type of realism that, although severe, preserves the heritage of the avant-garde, in a synthesis between tradition and modernity.