3 days ago
Exhibition honours Spain's ‘forgotten surrealist'
F or decades, the Spanish surrealist painter Óscar Domínguez was reputed to be the 'wildest and woolliest' of Paris's artists.
But a hot night of heavy drinking in 1938 in his Montparnasse studio proved fateful. He accidentally blinded the Romanian painter Victor Brauner in one eye when he threw a glass in defence of another artist. The affray contributed to the breakup of the surrealist group.
Such was Domínguez's bohemian cavorting that his 'excesses' overshadowed his art. So argues Isidro Hernández, the curator of an exhibition in Malaga that seeks to restore Domínguez to his 'rightful place' alongside Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí as one of the outstanding Spanish luminaries of the movement.
Domínguez may have agreed, but it was carousing that first liberated him to pursue painting. The son of a wealthy Canary Islands banana plantation owner, he arrived in Paris in 1925 at the age of 19 to sell his father's produce. 'I went on a binge for three months,' he recalled. 'Naturally, he fired me.'
