SERVANDO DEL PILAR

His first years of education passed in the School of Fine Arts of San Femando in Madrid. After a short stay in Paris where he worked in the studio of Gines Parra he returns to Spain and becomes a part of an artistic cicle of the capital, participating in the First Salon of the Independent that marked the new season of the Heraldo in Madrid. The exhibition was on from the 30th of November to the 10th of December 1929. The participants were young artists like Arronte, Cobo Barquera, Rafael Boti, Diaz Caneja, Isaias Diaz, Lopez Obrero, Ponce de Leon and Pablo Zeiaya. A year later, in October 1930, there was the second exhibition in which Servando del Pilar participated as well. He was collaborating at the graphics of Atlantico and La Farsa.

He was one of the founders of the Manifestation of the Public Opinion to the Officials published in the diary La Tierra on the 29th of April 1931. He also participated in the Syndicate Group of Artists and the New Federation of the Arts. At the same time he familiarized himself with the artistic life through the vanguard magazine Gaceta de Arte (1932-1936), edited by Eduardo Westerdahl. The content of the publications deals with the constructive abstraction, the racional architecture, the magic realism, the social realism, and surrealism. Servando Pilar was also famous as he published the portraits of Garcia Cabrera, Domingo Lopez Torres and Raymond Matthys, and he received two anonymous articles about his exhibition in the Circle of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz.

When the Civil war broke out he joined the Republicans as many artists did. In 1937 the political situation aggravated more and more and an agressive propaganda campaign was mounted against the insurgents, as it is known from the albums with drawings of various artists. Among them the drawings of Servando del Pilar in the album Madrid of that year can be distinguished. Soon afterwards he settled down in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and came back to Madrid one day.