RAMÓN DE ZUBIAURRE

Ramon de Zubiaurre was born in Garay, Vizcaya, in 1882. His father was a musician, a pipe organ player and the maestro of the Royal Chapel in Madrid. Just like his elder brother Ramon also dedicated himself to painting. He was deaf and mute from his birth and of course it favoured his major tendency to observe the world. The family had to move to Madrid because of his father's new work, but Ramon, due to the health problems he was born with, spent the first four years of his life in Garay in the charge of a woman who was his neighbour. His challenged childhood spent in the Basque Country influenced later his painting that was full of sensibility towards the Basque landscape and the Basque people.

Soon afterwards he made a decision to become a painter and it is known that at the age of ten he was already painting with Luis Carriendo. Later he learned from Francisco Aznar at the Central School of Arts and Crafts until his official enrolment to the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. There he had an opportunity to learn a great deal about painting as such maestros as Carlos de Haes, Moreno Carbonero, Munoz Degrain and Alejandro Ferrant worked in that school. Every summer he joined his family in Garay and put into practice the lessons of painting and drank in the sensibility of his native land. Approximately in 1989 he went on a journey with his mother and his brother to France, Belgium, and Holland and in 1902 he got a pension in Paris from la Excma Diputacion of Vizcaya. Without a doubt this journey abroad favoured his opening his mind to new tendencies in the European painting such as impressionism.

It was in 1904 when he finished his education of a painter and it coincided with the fact that he was awarded the Honourable Diploma at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts where he exposed various canvases like The Portrait of Don Juan Mayeras, The Portrait of the Writer and From Ondarroa. He stuck to the genre of portrait and in 1911 he made a portrait of Miguel de Unamuno. From 1912 till 1913 he lived for one season in Volendam in Holland, and it was a fruitful period influenced by the Dutch iconographic motifs and above all by experiments with colours. It was at this moment when Zubiaurre perfected his style, marked by the influence of the shades of colours of the objects he represented, but he also remembered about drawing. Masses of colours that make groups of objects with the usual use of the oriental perspectives and certain genuineness in the representation of the world that is disappearing.

The highlight of the both brothers' career was the exhibition of their works in the studios next to other Basque artists of Bilbao. From that time on, the exhibitions are becoming more and more numerous and they ended up with their international culmination in Madrid in 1917 in the halls of "La Tribuna" and in 1921 exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rosario de Santa Fe. The following year he took part in the Biennial of Venice where he displayed his work Rogues and Beggars that was handed to the Museum of Art in Rome. He also took part in the Spanish Exhibition in London. He married Isolina Gallego from Chili in 1918, the same year when he studied in Madrid.

It should be mentioned that he was awarded the First Medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts for his canvas The Basque Seaman Shanti Andia, the Valiant. The characteristics of the style of Ramon de Zubiaurre are manifested in this painting: the correlation between the lines of objects and the masses of colours, foregrounding the surface of the painting as the essential characteristic. On the other hand with the representation of the ethnography and the Basque traditions of the country, with his attempt of a certain melancholic touch made evident with the help of the colours, he tries to show the people and landscape of the country that he knows and loves since his childhood.

In the decade starting from 1926 till the Spanish Civil War, Zubiaurre continues mounting numerous national and international exhibitions, like those in Paris, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Valparaiso, Madrid and Bilbao. During the Civil War with a lack of themes for painting and the difficulty to paint abroad Zubiarre made simple drawings with few shadows, especially the human figures and portraits, that were followed by the representations of people, the Basques most of all, as an iconographical motif. After the war he lived in Chili for ten years and there he continued painting portraits.

In 1951 he came back to Spain and returned to the popular themes of holidays and dances. Until his dying breath he continued painting and elaborating the compositions that are interpreted nowadays as images of the spirit of someone who is both a humorist and melancholic and who tells us about a traditional society that is definitely lost. He died in 1969 but before his death he had taken a box with the soil from Vizcaya and an acorn of an oak tree in Guernica in order to be buried next to it and to plant a tree that would grow above him, showing the natural cycle of life and death.

Claudio Coello 6 28001 Madrid tel. (34) 91 435 0174 galeria@josedelamano.com