Spanish art and architecture: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Classic, Romantic, and Modern

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Classic, Romantic, and Modern

Among 19th-century painters, José de Madrazo y Agudo belonged with the school of Jacques-Louis David and Mariano Fortuny with French romantic and historical painters. The foremost architect working in the neoclassical style was Juan de Villanueva. At the turn of the century the architect Antonio Gaudí designed a number of startling and enormously original structures in Barcelona, including the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family.

The foremost of modern painters, Pablo Picasso, though born a Spaniard, is permanently associated with the school of Paris, as are the cubist Juan Gris, the surrealists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, and the sculptor Julio González. Nonetheless, each has in his style something that is distinctively Spanish in origin. In the 1950s there was an outburst of abstract expressionism in Spain represented in the works of Antonio Tapies and Luis Sáez, among many others. Eduardo Chillida is a major modern Spanish sculptor, as are Francisco Barón, José Luis Sánchez y Gabino, and Martin Chirino. Notable contemporary painters include Luis Ficto José Francés, and Rafael Canogar.

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