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Artist or Maker: Oscar Domínguez (1906-1958)

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Description: Femme sur divan
signed and dated 'O.Domínguez 42' (lower left)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65 x 81 cm.)
Painted in 1942

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Provenance: Galerie André-François Petit, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1966.

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Exhibited: Leverkusen, Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich, Oscar Domínguez, 1967, no. 7.
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Oscar Domínguez, Antológica 1926-1957, January - March 1996, no. 77 (illustrated p. 161); this exhibition later travelled to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Centro de Arte "La Granja", April - May 1996, and Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, June - September 1996.

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Published: E. Westerdahl, Oscar Domínguez, Madrid, 1971, p. 55 (illustrated).
F. Castro, Oscar Domínguez y el Surrealismo, Madrid, 1978, no. 87 (illustrated p. 131).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR

In 1927 at the age of twenty-one, Oscar Domínguez was sent to Paris to work for his family's Tenerife-based banana export business. There, at the end of the '20s he came under the influence of the blossoming Surrealist movement, but it was not until 1933 that he first met its high-priest, André Breton. Breton officially recognized Domínguez as a member of the Surrealist movement the following year and his paintings were exhibited in the major Surrealist exhibitions in Copenhagen in 1935 and in London in 1936.

The present work displays Domínguez's developing aesthetic of the 1940s. The highly charged, chaotic and threatening landscapes of the late 1930s had given way in the early 1940s to a softer style, more reliant on definite forms and brighter, more descriptive use of colour. In the present work, the woman's figure is almost sculptural in form, described in an elegant combination of angles and curves. The angular, architectural lines that emanate from the central part of her body are reflected in the background; walls and compartments always retained a significance for Dominguez - a geometric structure that perhaps sprang from the view from the divided glass plate windows of his Parisian studio.

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