Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Tennessee
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 2000

Exhibited
Venice, Spain Pavilion, 33rd Venice Bienale, 1966

Cuatro fases en torno a una prohibición (1966) is a masterwork by one of Spain's most significant Contemporary artists. Created at the high point of Juan Genovés' career, the work was selected by the artist to be shown when he was chosen to represent Spain at the 33rd Venice Biennale held in 1966. The artist received the Jury's Honorable Mention for his participation at the illustrious international exhibit, which lead to global acclaim and worldwide representation by Marlborough Gallery later that year.

Despite the artist's international success, Genovés continued to occupy a precarious place in the Spanish art world until his recent death in 2020. As a Communist and fierce critic of Francisco Franco's regime, Genovés was hailed as one of the most politically outspoken artists in the years surrounding Franco's death in 1975. Often accused of blatant provocation, which on one occasion led to the firing of a curator at the National Library in Madrid, his protests and political murals became an important feature of the anti-Fascist struggle during the Spanish Transition.

Born in 1930, Genovès claims that his earliest memories of the Spanish Civil War cast a long shadow on his childhood in Valencia - a site central to the armed conflict. Schooled at the Escuela Superieur de Bellas Artes, Genovés had from his days as a student, tried to break away from what he saw as the academy's stifling conservatism. Drawn to the currents in Art Informel that had overtaken European Modernism in the Post War years, Genovés took part in several Spanish art movements that shared his aesthetic interests, such as Los Siete and Parpallós. In 1960 he co-founded the Hondo Group, which explored new ways to understand figurativism, and made explicit references to the artists' political, left-leaning ideology. Genovés saw this as a way to compensate for the severe restrictions placed on civil liberties during the Franco regime. For Genovés and the other members of the Hondo Group, the human presence became a preoccupying force.

The 1960s saw Genovés began to develop what would become his instantly recognizable style, evident in the present work. The artist experimented with scenes of large groups shown at a distance in a diminutive scale. The figures look as if they have been captured within the range of a telescope, a camera, a searchlight, or even a viewfinder on a weapon. This effect renders the anonymous figures as if they are fugitives or enemy combatants. The viewer's perspective is that of a surveillance device capable of registering the whereabouts of individuals and tracing the movements of large social gatherings. Rather than displaying the masses as an embodiment of a monolithic authority, his work from this period visualizes them as disempowered, as if fleeing an immediate threat such as an aerial bombing.

Genovés cited both cinema and television as an influence on his style, which have given his work a reportage character. He sought an artistic language that the world had grown accustomed to, and which by the mid 1960s was still primarily viewed in black and white. The somber palette and unusual vantage points also recalled the Soviet films that he watched as a child in Valencia. Cuatro fases en torno a una prohibición features the same perspective looking down onto a running group who pass over an ambiguous white line. In the final quadrant at the bottom right a small number of fallen figures signify the unlucky few who were not able to make it to safety.

A significant influence on the young Genovés, one can also see references to Pablo Picasso's 1937 masterpiece Guernica which protested the rise of Franco and the carpet bombing of a Basque town. Decades later, Genovés channeled Picasso's stark black and white palette and the overtly political subject matter into his own powerful scenes.

Genovés' paintings and sculptures are held in institutional collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern in Spain. He won the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, given by Spain's Ministry of Culture, in 2005.