Francesc Gimeno, an Artiste Maudit
Curator:
Jordi À. Carbonell, lecturer in Art History at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona), and Cristina Mendoza, head keeper at the Modern Art Department.
Tab Group Exhibition A contemporary of the Modernista generation, Francesc Gimeno (Tortosa, 1858 – Barcelona, 1927) is one of the most unusual and unfairly treated figures in modern Catalan art. This is demonstrated by the fact that this is the first major exhibition devoted to him by a public institution in his country.
Made up of 88 works, including paintings and drawings from several museums and private collections, the exhibition is arranged in five sections that follow the stylistic evolution of Gimeno's art. The fist consists of landscapes painted under the influence of Carlos de Haes, the pioneer of naturalist landscape painting in Spain. One important section presents the work done in the 1890s, a period during which the artist tried unsuccessfully to make his way in the artistic atmosphere of the time. A third section gathers a broad selection of work done between 1900 and 1914, the years in which Gimeno, disillusioned by the world of art, continued to paint aloof from and sometimes against the current of the predominant art movements. Following the first individual exhibition he held in Barcelona in 1915, Gimeno was able to give up working for a living as a painter-decorator and devote himself to painting. The works of this period, which continued until his death, make up another section in which are exhibited his more ambitious landscapes, such as the ones he did of the Costa Brava. The exceptional quality of his self-portraits can be appreciated in a monographic section containing a selection from the many he painted. With the collaboration of Fundació Caixa Tarragona