Untitled #53
Date1972
Mediumoil on canvas
DimensionsCanvas: 32 × 28 inches (81.3 × 71.1 cm)
Framed: 32 3/4 × 28 5/8 × 1 5/8 inches (83.2 × 72.7 × 4.1 cm)
Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. Dwight H. Emanuelson.
Object number1981.13.2
Copyright© Harriet and Esteban Vicente Foundation.
The images and text contained on this page are owned by Telfair Museums or used by the Museum with permission from the owners. Unauthorized reproduction, transmission or display of these materials is prohibited with the exception of items deemed “fair use” as defined by U.S. and international copyright laws.Label TextUntitled #53 is one of Vicente’s most haunting works. Its limited palette of softly diffused, spray-painted blues and brownish-grays speaks of the profound austerity and simplicity of the Spanish masters he revered—Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya—while its architectonic play of vertical and horizontal rectilinear forms is radically twentieth century, acknowledging analytic cubism’s engagement with the plane, picture surface, and framing edge as the basic units of pictorial structure.
Concerned throughout his working life with the interplay of color and light, the material facts of pigment, and the transformative power of feeling, Vicente liked to describe his paintings as “interior landscapes.” Here, as the picture’s intimate scale suggests, Vicente arrives, through deliberately unembellished means, at a richly intuitive statement of classic sublimity and timeless calm.
