Francisco Bores.
Gouaches for Poe’s
“The Raven”
From 15 December 2016 to 5 February 2017
Balcony Gallery, first floor. Free entry
The Museum presents an exhibition on the series of gouaches that Francisco Bores (Madrid,
1898-Paris, 1972) painted in the first half of the 1960s to illustrate the poem The Raven (1845)
by Edgar Allen Poe. Unpublished until recently, these twelve gouaches are now exhibited for
the first time alongside a canvas of the same period entitled Summer Landscape (1965).
In contrast to the most celebrated of Poe’s illustrators, such as Édouard Manet and Gustave
Doré, Bores eliminated any narrative element. His images of the raven, either alone or with
Lenore, recall those of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, but deploy a more lyrical and
sensual idiom.
Nevertheless, Bores’s approach to Poe should also be understood in the context of the deep
mark Poe’s oeuvre left on three whole generations of French writers through the work of
Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. This attraction did not stem so much from his gothic
tales but chiefly from his conception of poetry as artifice.
As well as Summer Landscape, the gouaches for “The Raven” should be placed in the context
of Bores’s late work, specifically that of the late 1950s and, above all, the first half of the
1960s. In this final period, figures and objects that formerly retained their independence in a
space hinted at through subtle lights and transparencies are now deformed as a result of being
subjected to a constrained space and centripetal arrangement. The use of thick contour lines
helps isolate the areas of colour and emphasise their different spatial depth.
Image: Francisco Bores. The Raven, c. 1960-1965. Private Collection © Francisco Bores, 2016
More information and images contact to:
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza – Oficina de Prensa. Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid. Tel. +34 914203944
/913600236.Fax+34914202780. [email protected]; www.museothyssen.org;
http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2016/Bores/index.html
In these works Bores achieved the maximum degree of expressivity. In comparison to his oil
paintings, which are more precisely conceived, these allowed him greater room for
experimentation and it could be said that the Madrid-born painter felt freer and particularly at
ease when using this technique. In addition, the transparency and matte quality of gouache
allowed him to obtain a subtle and harmonious luminosity. In both the illustrations on display
in the exhibition and in the rest of his oeuvre Bores remained true to his conviction that “truth
should be expressed in a moderate tone.”
Francisco Bores (Madrid, 1898-Paris, 1972)
Francisco Bores in his studio of Mourlot
in Paris, 1961
Born into an upper middle-class family of
Madrid, Bores trained at the academy of the
Valencian painter Cecilio Pla. In 1922 he
began creating illustrations for modern and
Ultraist magazines such as Horizonte,
Tobogán, Plural, Alfar and España, as well as
Revista de Occidente, whose chief editor was
Ortega y Gasset. The first major revelation of
his oeuvre came at an exhibition held in
1925, the Exposición de Artistas Ibéricos.
However, by then, weary of the Madrid
public’s lack of interest in New Art, Bores
had decided to emigrate to Paris, where he
would spend the rest of his life.
During his early years in Paris, Bores embraced the language of Cubism and adopted the
“deductive” working method of another great painter from Madrid: Juan Gris. However, he
strove to put the strict geometry of Cubism behind him and tinge his canvases with the
spontaneity of Surrealism. As he later pointed out, “we attempted a sort of synthesis between
the artistic legacy of Braque and Cézanne and the desire for lyricism.”
After coming close to abstraction in 1928, he was prompted by a visit to Provence the
following summer to attach new importance to light and ambience in his paintings, taking up
the Impressionists’ legacy. “I was suffocating in the Cubist compositions”, he recalls. “I felt like
opening the windows and letting the painting breathe.”
By then hailed by French critics as one of the key members of the “School of Paris”, Bores
summed up his conception of art as jouissance – or sensual enjoyment – as follows: “Painting
is a sensual act, it can be liked to a fruit we savour with our fingers, its skin is identified with
ours.”
From 1934 onwards the painter’s work became imbued with greater intimism. Even during the
years of hardship, when Paris was under German occupation and he was forced to live apart
from his wife and daughter, he continued to work on indoor scenes with a carefully calculated
luminosity.
The late 1940s and early 1950s were a fruitful period. Having acquired a certain financial
stability, he was able to devote himself intensely to painting and to reflecting on his work as an
artist. Around 1950, in what critics called his “white manner”, Bores lightened the consistency
of figures and objects to achieve greater luminosity and spatial transparency. The result was
paintings that verged on abstraction with their purity of form, but without relinquishing “visual
truth”. Indeed, for the artist painting was always, above all, “a means of exploring the outside
world, and in particular of exploring spatial relations, which can only be explained through
pictorial language”
EXHIBITION DETAILS AND VISITOR INFORMATION
Title: Francisco Bores. Gouaches para "El cuervo" de Poe
Dates: 15 December 2016 to 5 February 2017
Organiser: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Curator: Juan Ángel López, curator at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Opening times: Mondays, 12 noon to 4pm; Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am to 7pm
Venue: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Paseo del Prado, 8. Madrid.
First floor Balcony Gallery, direct access from the Main Hall.
Free entry
Download press release and images:
http://www.museothyssen.org/microsites/prensa/2016/Bores/index.html