JUAN ANTONIO MORALES

After living with his family during a short stay in Cuba, he carries out his Bachillerato studies in Valladolid. In 1927 he gets back to the island with the intention to study medicine, but he will leave it very soon to devote himself to painting. Again in Spain, he presents in 1931 his first exhibition in the Mercantile Circle of Valladolid, and moves to Madrid with an intention to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He gets integrated in the artistic environment of the capital, he becomes disciple of Daniel Vázquez Díaz and meets José Caballero with whom he will share his study from 1934, time in which both realized the poster of Yerma of the poet Federico García Lorca.

In Juan Antonio Morales we find a repeated case in the Spanish art in the first half of the century. Again, a young painter, formed in the traditional figurative art, falls into surrealism, especially due to the influence of the painter José Caballero, giving his works a confusion of terms between what is real and what is dreamt. In the thirties he gives a turn to his art and directs it to new European realisms. Besides, in the case of Juan Antonio Morales, the knowledge of figurative language is deep, and so, it is very precise. There is no doubt about the influence of Italian artists such as Morandi, De Chirico or Massimo Campigli, which gives his works an archaic air in its scenes and figures, and the primacy of the tactile feelings, more common to mural painting.

Juan Antonio Morales carried out numerous posters for fairs and parties of his hometown. During the Spanish civil war he fought at the front, collaborated with the Antifascist Intellectuals Alliance, in magazines like the Mono Azul or El Buque Rojo and, it is believed, did the famous poster Los nacionales.

After the war he is arrested, however later, oddly, he will became portrayer of the high society, painting for instance Francisco Franco in several occasions.

 In the forties, a tendency to the classicist figurative art can be seen in the work of Juan Antonio Morales, connecting him to other personal experiences of artists such as Luis Castellanos or Benjamín Palencia. In those works we find the same concept of the object overloaded with reality and simplicity in the most classic line as the still life of Zurbarán or Meléndez.

Juan Antonio Morales entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1964 and a decade later he will do the same in the Academy of Fine Arts of Spain in Rome.