Lot Essay
In this powerful triptych from 1959, Saura depicts what was to become a constant in his oeuvre: the sexuality of womankind. Similar to De Kooning's imagery of the female form, Saura's nudes are often grotesque and menacing. The figures are portrayed as a disfigured agglomeration of body parts hanging from a central axis which is the spinal cord, the only element which offers verticality and unity. Monstrous stomachs, pendulous breasts, and protruding insect-like eyes inundate the canvas.
Although Saura was one of the founders of the Spanish art movement El Paso, stylistically related to Abstract Expressionism, the artist never abandoned the figure. Like De Kooning, the wild and gestural brushstrokes associate him with action painting but in fact they were methods for portraying the female figure in a more powerful light.
The reduced monochromatic palette in The Three Graces is used to dramatic effect. Black splashes on a white background, and vice-versa, are suggestive of the lighting effects practised by Spanish old masters such as Zurbaran and Ribera. Saura visited The Prado Museum in Madrid and was familiar with Spanish 17th century art as well as with Titian and Rubens. The Prado was a great source of inspiration for Saura. Many of his most constant themes throughout his career are based on Velazquez and Goya: series such as Goya's Dog, The Portraits of Phillip II and the portraits of Las Meninas. It was probably Ruben's Three Graces in the Prado's permanent collection that inspired the present triptych.
Saura's Three Graces is a painting highly charged with sexuality. Unlike the traditional versions of this subject in which the three women daintily hold hands, here each female is isolated in their separate panels. Each figure competes with the other in offering the viewer their sexual qualities. These women are not poutingly seductive like traditional fleshy depictions of the female nude. Their eroticism is more crude and blatant. They are the very embodiment of raw sexuality.
Saura himself differentiates "erotic art" and "sexual art", the latter having the ability to transcend periods of taste and fashion. He writes of the sexuality portrayed by the likes of El Greco and Goya: "Their obscenity, their obscene beauty, does not come from what they represent but from the general impulse which is behind them. Some of the works of Rubens, El Greco and Goya, as will happen later with Picasso, Pollock and De Kooning, are not obscene just from the elements which make them up, but from the orgiastic, not to say orgasmic sexuality which they contain and which they transmit to the observer..." (Francisco Calvo Serraller, Antonio Saura, Milan 1994, p. 32). This is the essence behind the power of his own Three Graces.
Although Saura was one of the founders of the Spanish art movement El Paso, stylistically related to Abstract Expressionism, the artist never abandoned the figure. Like De Kooning, the wild and gestural brushstrokes associate him with action painting but in fact they were methods for portraying the female figure in a more powerful light.
The reduced monochromatic palette in The Three Graces is used to dramatic effect. Black splashes on a white background, and vice-versa, are suggestive of the lighting effects practised by Spanish old masters such as Zurbaran and Ribera. Saura visited The Prado Museum in Madrid and was familiar with Spanish 17th century art as well as with Titian and Rubens. The Prado was a great source of inspiration for Saura. Many of his most constant themes throughout his career are based on Velazquez and Goya: series such as Goya's Dog, The Portraits of Phillip II and the portraits of Las Meninas. It was probably Ruben's Three Graces in the Prado's permanent collection that inspired the present triptych.
Saura's Three Graces is a painting highly charged with sexuality. Unlike the traditional versions of this subject in which the three women daintily hold hands, here each female is isolated in their separate panels. Each figure competes with the other in offering the viewer their sexual qualities. These women are not poutingly seductive like traditional fleshy depictions of the female nude. Their eroticism is more crude and blatant. They are the very embodiment of raw sexuality.
Saura himself differentiates "erotic art" and "sexual art", the latter having the ability to transcend periods of taste and fashion. He writes of the sexuality portrayed by the likes of El Greco and Goya: "Their obscenity, their obscene beauty, does not come from what they represent but from the general impulse which is behind them. Some of the works of Rubens, El Greco and Goya, as will happen later with Picasso, Pollock and De Kooning, are not obscene just from the elements which make them up, but from the orgiastic, not to say orgasmic sexuality which they contain and which they transmit to the observer..." (Francisco Calvo Serraller, Antonio Saura, Milan 1994, p. 32). This is the essence behind the power of his own Three Graces.