Youth and training

He contracted malaria in his childhood, which led him to spend many hours devoted to drawing, thus awakening a vocation that led him to move to Barcelona where, in 1907, he began his pictorial training at La llotja.

Between 1907 and 1913 he travelled to Paris, Madrid and Marseilles, but it was not until 1919 that he settled in the French capital, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, met artists such as Ossip Zadkine and Lipchitz and came into contact with the avant-garde movements.

His first exhibitions: between Paris and Barcelona Already integrated into Parisian life, he returned to Barcelona in 1921 to present his first exhibition at Josep Dalmau’s famous Galeries Dalmau, the same gallery where Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Torres-García, among many others, had exhibited.

During 1922 and 1923 he collaborated with André Derain as a model but also as an assistant: he prepared his canvases and helped him in the creation of sets for theatrical works. This relationship was broken when Picasso asked him to pose for him and Salvadó was immortalised in the famous harlequin portraits. In gratitude for these sessions, Picasso bought three works from him and introduced him to the world of Paris art dealers.

In the mid-1920s Salvadó began to exhibit regularly in Paris galleries such as Bing and Worms-Billet, and his painting gradually abandoned the expressionism of his early years and moved towards abstraction. On a personal level, he married the dancer and pianist Anita Wiskeman.

The arrival of the Republic led him to spend periods of time in Catalonia, but in 1935 he went into exile for good, settling in Le Castellet, where he lived until his interest in abstraction and the outbreak of the Second World War led him to move to Switzerland, where he made contact with the Bauhaus group and became acquainted with Jean Arp and Auguste Herbin.

He exhibited at the Galerie des Eaux-Vives, the centre of geometric abstract art, and his work was dominated by curved lines and colour, although he eventually also incorporated straight lines.

 

Artistic consolidation

The end of the Nazi occupation led him to return to Le Castellet, but he kept in touch with Paris. When Herbin inaugurated the Salon des Realites nouvelles in 1946, Salvadó joined it for the editions from 1948 to 1956.

The 1950s also saw a brief return to figuration, which he combined with his abstract painting. In the middle of that decade he became interested in Informalism with work close to that of Vieira da Silava, although he never abandoned geometric abstraction. His painting manages to reduce abstract form to a basically optical phenomenon of bright, contrasting colours that can be considered a forerunner of Vasarely’s work.

The 1960s were a difficult decade. Economic difficulties led Salvadó to take up ceramics, which enabled him to make stained glass windows and ceramics in the church of La Forcaz, in Haute Savoie.

His wife Anita dies and he decides to move to Paris, where he exhibits at the Simone Héller gallery. He met Marcelle Rezzonico, who eventually became his third wife.

In the 1970s, when he settled in Paris, his abstract and geometric work reached its maximum expression. These were years of critical acclaim and exhibitions in important galleries such as Juana Mordó in Madrid or Simone Heller in Paris as well as in Lisbon, Zaragoza, Alicante…

In 1983, Jacint Salvadó dies in Le Castellet.

 

Recognition

After his death, Salvadó’s work went unnoticed, but little by little his figure became more and more important: in the 1990s, solo exhibitions began to appear in galleries in France, Germany, Spain… In Barcelona, the Pia Almoina presented the first retrospective of his work. Curated by Maria Lluïssa Borràs, the exhibition presents from his beginnings marked by expressionism to the final geometric stage, including his informalist years.

The Town Council of his native Mont-roig del Camp also vindicated his figure with an exhibition in 2000 and his work is prominently featured in the exhibition “25 anys de galería” presented by the Sala Dalmau in Barcelona, which was awarded the prize for the best exhibition of 2005 by the Catalan Association of Art Critics. He had solo exhibitions at the same gallery in 1994, 2003 and 2011.2 In 2002 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented a complete retrospective of his work, accompanied by a magnificent catalogue that made his work known to the general public.

In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art of Tarragona also vindicated his work with the exhibition “Jacint Salvadó: un camí vers l’abstracció”, the most important exhibition devoted to him in Catalonia to date.

2015 was an important year for her career, with three simultaneous exhibitions at the Sala Dalmau in Barcelona, the Muro gallery in Valencia and the Cervantes Institute in Paris, the latter being her first institutional recognition in France, her adopted country.

 

Work and legacy

Salvadó’s work was recognised by the critics from the beginning of his career, and following one of his first exhibitions at the Bing gallery in Paris, the prestigious Waldemar Georges wrote:

“Salvadó’s unforgettable exhibition at the Bing gallery gives us a complete idea of the guaranteed talent of this artist. A great painter whose simple attempts are of undoubted interest. This Spaniard paints and suggests snow as only Flemish painters have known how to do”.

Juan Manuel Bonet, art critic and director of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno and the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, who already included Salvadó in his famous “Diccionario de las Vanguardias en España, 1907-1936”, in the introduction to the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía referred to the years from the 1960s onwards, saying: “…were those of his great work”.

Definitely returning to geometry, he lived it with a very personal mixture of rigour and freedom, devoted to a labyrinthine composition, to a radiant chromaticism, to a warm style that reveals a strong pictorialist will. His paintings of that time, many of them exceptional, are unlike anything done by his Spanish friends of the straight line…”.

In his native Catalonia his work has also been vindicated: in his presentation for the exhibition at the Sala Dalmau in Barcelona, the former director of the National Art Museum of Catalonia, Xavier Barral i Altet, wrote: “We are left with the pleasure of his painting, of these geometries constructed with colours which from the early seventies onwards have characterised the vital joy of his canvases, the permanent youth of a painter who still speaks to us with his immobile brushes. Salvadó’s name is a point apart in the history of Catalan art; in the history of French art, on the other hand, he has a consolidated place alongside movements such as Cercle et Carré or Rélités Nouvelles and names such as Bazaine, Manessier or Jean Hélion and Auguste Herbin.

The art critic of El Periódico de Catalunya, Josep Maria Cadena, in his review of Salvadó’s exhibition at the Sala Dalmau in Barcelona in 2003, claimed that Salvadó was a figure for the general public: “He is, therefore, a painter recognised at a high critical and academic level, but who has not yet made an impression on the broadest sector of followers of contemporary painting”. In the catalogue of the exhibition devoted to him by the Museum of Modern Art of Tarragona in 2008, the scholar of Salvadó’s work, Antonio Salcedo Miliani, comments on his informalist period: “…what interests the artist is plastic experimentation and the freedom it gives him when he paints. The pictorial act has a unique character in these works, which can be summed up in the pure act of painting, which takes shape in each work according to the personality of the creator, according to his state of mind and according to his experience and knowledge”.