Gil Cuatrecasas
Master of Color
Represented in: La Jolla, LA, London, New York,
Paris, Barcelona and Milan, Buenos Aires.
Gil Cuatrecasas (1935-2004) was a Spanish-born, Harvard-educated artist who after working with Josef Albers at Yale merged with the Washington Color School. He worked alongside Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and others now masters enshrined in the pantheon of great American Color field painters—a movement that paralleled Abstract Expressionism in New York. Although Cuatrecasas rapidly achieved critical acclaim in the 1960s, he suddenly left Washington for Barcelona and Europe. He was intent on departing significantly from his Color School style, and redirecting his work along radically new and different directions. He worked tirelessly but quietly, and after ten years he had achieved a major transformation with exalting success.
“An original, major 20th century master.”
2017, Donald Kuspit, dean of American art historians
“A tour-de-force in contemporary abstract painting.”
2017, Professor Robert Morgan, art historian
The "Cuatrecasas Discovery"
“…no one has ever painted like this.”
2017, Peter Hastings Falk, art historian
Currently released are paintings from his “Torino Collection”—named for the Italian city in which Cuatrecasas painted from 1970 to 1976. Paintings from this series had originally been slated for a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston. But beginning in 1976 Cuatrecasas suffered a devastating sequence of events that began with a destructive flood in Houston, just before the exhibition. Despite the total loss of hundreds of canvases, Cuatrecasas recovered sufficiently quickly to place the remainder of his collection in safe storage. Returning to Barcelona he worked vigorously to convert an old stone farmhouse into a live-in studio, but this and his resources failed. He was thus left, forever, without a place to paint properly. He was then overcome by a bout of alcoholism, compounded later by tuberculosis, and ended with cancer.
Art historian and curator Peter Hastings Falk points out that “Cuatrecasas was a genius of single-minded pursuit who created his own unique style. Then he suddenly slipped from sight. Now his collection presents a new and compelling chapter in art history, shared by America and Spain.”
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