Julio Barragán (1928 – 14 January 2011) was an Argentine painter of the Concretist and Cubist schools.

Life and work

Barragán was born in

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...

. He began studying art at age 12, creating reproductions of Renaissance art masters such as

El Greco Doménikos Theotokópoulos (, ; 1 October 1541 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco (; "The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance, regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. ...

. He studied at the National School of Ceramics, where he graduated in 1945 with a technical degree and met his future wife, María de las Nieves Adeff (born 1926). Adeff later became an accomplished potter. His work was first exhibited at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1946. His early work was Realist, and he rejected the contemporary genres that had already marked the careers of, among others, his elder brother, Luis Barragán. Barragán traveled to

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, in the late 1940s, however, and was influenced by Georges Braque and

Pablo Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...

. He joined the "Twenty Painters and Sculptors" group with his brother, Bruno Venier, and Oscar Capristo, among others. The group, active in Argentina between 1952 and 1963, exhibited works in a number of Abstract genres, although Julio Barragán's

Concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...

phase contrasted with much of the group's more surreal work. His style of painting then shifted to Cubism, adopting a

chiaroscuro In art, chiaroscuro ( , ; ) is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to ach ...

tone that would become his trademark. The landscapes and cityscapes he painted in subsequent decades were marked by Cubist and Impressionist influences. These became his best-known works, and to meet growing demand, he adopted an "

assembly line An assembly line, often called ''progressive assembly'', is a manufacturing process where the unfinished product moves in a direct line from workstation to workstation, with parts added in sequence until the final product is completed. By mechan ...

" routine at his Villa Urquiza atelier, whereby several easels were assembled in a row that allowed Barragán to alternate randomly from one work to another. Barragán's work was exhibited in most of the nation's leading art galleries, including the Gutiérrez y Guad,

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, Wildenstein, and Witcomb galleries, as well as in the Eduardo Sívori Museum and others. His work earned the Braque Prize at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (1964), the Grand Prize in Painting at the Belgrano Municipal Salon (1970), and First Prizes at the National Salon in 1976 and 1978. Local art critic Mauricio Neuman described him as a ''"solitary aristocrat of beauty."'' He retired from Buenos Aires' art shows in 2005, and died in his Almagro neighborhood home in 2011 at age 82.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barragan, Julio 1928 births 2011 deaths Painters from Buenos Aires Argentine people of Spanish descent 20th-century Argentine painters 21st-century Argentine painters Argentine male painters Argentine ceramists Argentine cubist artists