Madrid Life and Street Scenes

In the early 1930's my father began to grabar a la punta seca (engrave dry points) under the tutelage of Alberto Ruperez, one of the most renowned engravers in Europe.

In the spring of 1934 forty of these engravings of Madrid street scenes and life were first shown at the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid and the reaction, it appears, surprised everyone, especially my father. For the first time the professional art critics wrote extensively about his work and large crowds of visitors began to appear at the show. It was with these engravings that his name first began to become widely known and the first comparisons to Goya were made. These were the etchings that Hemingway and Dos Passos became so excited about. Even now, I still have the engravings, in their original paper wrapping, Hemingway picked out for himself, known to us in the family as "the Hemingway collection," which inspired him to exclaim that they were: "the first true Madrid we have seen since Goya." And though my father considered himself first and foremost a muralist there have been those critics over the years who have thought his graphic work superior to his painting. Fortunately, a good deal of that early graphic work still survives. And it was as a Spanish artist, perhaps even as a Madrid artist, that he was emerging, with a uniquely personal aesthetic vision of his own. And whether it was the gray grit of the street or common domestic intimacies within an ordinary household, Madrid in the thirties poetically appears in these long forgotten etchings. For isn't it the power of reality which is the great driving force behind any artistic expression?

From Waiting at the Shore

"They're the best dry points I have ever seen by anybody living."

Ernest Hemingway in an unpublished 1934 letter to Alfred Barr which is in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art of New York.