Esteban Vicente

A member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Esteban Vicente was part of the most influential circles of his generation. During the course of his long and lauded career, he closely studied shape, light, and the possibilities of pigment.

Born in 1903 in Turégano, Spain, to a family that appreciated the arts, Vicente was raised in Madrid. He recalled being “bored” during visits to the Prado as a child, but at age 18 he enrolled at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes, where Salvador Dalí was a fellow student. After three years studying sculpture at the academy, Vicente turned his attention to painting. “I always made the heads too small anyway,” he recalled. (1)

During this period, the mid- and late 1920s, Vicente became fully immersed in Madrid’s cultural milieu, including the “Generation of ‘27”, a group of poets, artists, and other intellectuals interested in the avant-garde. His circle included Luis Buñuel, and he met Pablo Picasso and Michael Sonnabend. After exhibiting for several years in Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid, Vicente moved to New York in 1936.

During his first decade in New York, Vicente exhibited at the Kleeman Galleries, the Bonestell Gallery, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and developed friendships with critic Walter Pach and painter Joseph Stella. By the late 1940s, Vicente was committed to exploring abstraction, giving up his earlier representational style of painting.

With extensive personal and professional connections and a commitment to pursuing avant-garde art, Vicente was centrally located in New York’s burgeoning postwar art scene. In the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Vicente was a core member of the New York School, which included colleagues and friends Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Vicente was a voting member of The Club, and shared a studio with Willem de Kooning.

The influential galleries and critics of Abstract Expressionsim recognized Vicente’s bold, gestural work as of central importance to the era. He showed with Charles Egan, Leo Castelli, and Andre Emmerich, among others; friends included Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess. Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro included him in the Kootz Gallery’s “Talent 1950” exhibition, and Vicente participated in the seminal “Ninth Street” exhibition the following year.