Miguel Garcia Vivancos
(Mazarrón, 1895 – Cordova, 1972)

 

 

 

Miguel Garcia Vivancos,
Vase with a Lace Napkin, 1958.

Oil on canvas, 64 x 52 cm.

Musée International d’Art Naïf

Anatole Jakovsky, Nice.

 

 

Miguel Garcia Vivancos is the Spanish naive painter of rurality. He was a remarkable soldier during the Spanish civil war. Breton saluted him as “the man that the temporary defeat of his ideas and five years in the concentration camps of France didn’t manage to destroy and whose surprising destiny is now able to celebrate like no other what he succeeded in defending: the simplicity of a village, a chestnut tree in spring, the old stones of history [...] the little dreamy shops and the philosophical dazzle of mature wheat.” He actually celebrates the aestheticism of simplicity, the rurality in all its quietness and innocence. He picks up the smallest detail and knows how to make it significant like this harmless walk along the booksellers which witnesses the pleasure of the idleness of the French acquired through the third week of paid vacation. And if death is sometimes present in his work, it is only a stage. His painting is not a lament but praise. The fact that nature is in communion with man, like in The Plough where oxen and man unite their strength to plough the furrow, is a sort of prelude to a future life.