B. TURÉGANO, SPAIN, 1903
D. BRIDGEHAMPTON, NY, 2001
Esteban Vicente was a Spanish American painter belonging to the first generation of New York School abstract expressionists. Vicente made paintings and collages of jagged geometric shapes that seem to hover on the surface of his canvases and pulsate with light. For Vicente, color captured a sense of place, and in his later years the gardens surrounding his Long Island home inspired his use of vivid color and organic shapes.
Vicente, whose father was an amateur painter, spent his early years visiting the Prado Museum and studying at the School of Fine Arts of the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. As a young man living in Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, he developed friendships with artists and writers. In 1928, he had his first exhibition with Juan Bonafé at the Ateneo de Madrid. In 1936 Vicente left Europe for New York City, where he became associated with the fabled Cedar Tavern crowd. His contemporaries and associates included Willem de Kooning (their 10th Street studios were on a shared floor), Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. Vicente was among the faculty at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC; the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, New York, NY; and the University of California, Berkeley, CA, among other institutions.
His works can be found in important collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, among others. At the end of his life, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, a museum in his honor, was opened in Segovia by the Spanish government.
