Paisatge (Landscape)

Josep de Togores

Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain, 1893 - Barcelona, Spain, 1970
  • Date: 
    1917 (Altafulla, Tarragona)
  • Technique: 
    Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 
    48 x 57 cm
  • Category: 
    Painting
  • Entry date: 
    1997
  • Register number: 
    AD00042

Landscape is the main theme of the series created by Josep de Togores between 1916 and 1917 on the coast of Catalunya. Togores thus joins the circle of artists, Joan Miró and Joaquín Sunyer among them, who were interested in the search for light and in celebrating the Mediterranean landscape. Paisatge (Landscape) engages in a formal investigation by reformulating iconic elements of Catalunya's Mediterranean coast: pine and olive groves, popular and religious architecture and the sea that, with the sky, marks the horizon. In both concept and technique, Paisatge reveals the influence of Paul Cézanne and early Cubism, which had also found a model in Mediterranean landscape. Using flat brushstrokes applied diagonally and white tones that transmit luminosity, Togores builds the composition's tonal balance and progressively unveils a relief formed by clearly differentiated blocks. The work’s formal sobriety is marked by the “search for structure” and the emotional distance of the author, postulates which in those years were described by Joaquín Torres García and Eugenio d’Ors in the following terms: “The primary duty of the landscape artist is to not be part of the landscape”; artists must therefore “shield themselves from sensations and fully grasp that the world is an architecture.”

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