“Luis Seoane is the first contemporary artist in the history of Galicia. The statement is not unjustified and is required as a starting point. Especially when it comes to an artist that the writing of Spanish history has failed to understand in universal terms. A written history of Spanish art that fails to include this artist is like showing a map of Spain without including Galicia, or disregarding Galician as a language. But the truth remains that Luis Seoane has yet to be appreciated from a national and international artistic perspective, most likely because he has more of the latter than the former. That he completed most of his work exiled in Argentina can serve as an initial excuse for this lack of appreciation, although I believe the main reason lies more in the impossibility of placing and contextualizing him within a particular movement or trend.

Live chronicler of an era, his expertise and educational vocation or didactic intention also made him an essential and unique communicator. As Xavier Seoane said in Reto ou rendición [Challenge or Surrender], ‘Rarely has Galicia produced an intellectual with a less elitist attitude, more in connected to the collective sense, with the creativity and sensitivity of its people’. Indeed, the large number of collective projects he undertook, as well as his radio broadcasts, are examples of his open interest in the different cultural manifestations of the time. For 17 years Luis Seoane himself directed and wrote the scripts of the Galicia Emigrante radio shows from Buenos Aires, from 10 October 1954 to 18 April 1971. With the patron of Galician industry, Javier Vázquez Iglesias, living in Buenos Aires, these shows revealed Seoane’s intuitive style, his informative, diverse skill, his talent for communication. Luis Seoane was an exceptional writer, as evidenced by his pieces in Galicia Emigrante magazine, but also had the skill that a spoken medium like radio required. With art, literature and history as his background, he dissected food, film and music news, often with irony and humour. Meanwhile, during the breaks he would broadcast traditional Galician music with critical commentary. Choosing this way to communicate was probably a result of his passion for conversation and an innate ability to make sense of a wide range of projects, the same characteristics he demonstrated when producing his paintings and sketching memories.

From his exile Luis Seoane fought alongside intellectuals like Arturo Cuadrado, Lorenzo Varela, Rafael Dieste and Eduardo Blanco Amor. Buenos Aires was a cosmopolitan hub at the time as well as a place to publish books in a forbidden language: Galician. His list of Argentine friends included names like writer Jorge Luis Borges, poet Alberto Girri, photographer Horacio Coppola, Italian artist and stage designer Attilio Rossi and German calligrapher Jacobo Hermelin, among many others. Other regular visitors to the Seoane house were Rafael Alberti, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato, along with the aforementioned Galician intellectuals and artist Manuel Colmeiro, and he maintained correspondence with many other defenders of his cultural affiliation like Fernández del Riego and Carlos Maside, as well as a later entrepreneurial relationship with Isaac Díaz Pardo. Son of emigration and Argentine through adoption, Luis Seoane also actively participated in Argentine culture, work which was recognised with awards such as the Palanza Prize and honours like membership in the National Academy of Fine Arts, which he joined in 1968.

Luis Seoane works with Galician values in a universal manner. Hence the complexity of labelling a figure with so many facets, the difficulty in making a separate study of each of his disciplines. Because if Luis Seoane is known primarily as a painter, it must mean that his paintings are the result of a significant intellectual background, his progress and achievements in this discipline almost always reflected earlier in his drawings, his graphic design, his mural paintings and engravings. Painting which, on the other hand, is not quite fully understood by reducing it to its contextualization with main affiliations, yet which, on the other hand, comes close to any artist of international fame in the twentieth century, with an eye to Picasso, Matisse and Leger. But the early influence of Cézanne —almost always overlooked— is crucial, such as was that of his closest teacher, Carlos Maside. Malevich and other Russian artists were another major influence, and the achievements of Pop Art constituted another influence of the age that would reveal itself in the artist in a very different way, while sharing some of its values and formalisms. But, above all, his insatiable curiosity for German culture will help define a personality different from other renovators of the Galician, Spanish and Latin-American painting. Paul Klee influenced by Goya, George Grosz’s scenes, Hans Richter’s shapes and spaces… All are constant throughout Seoane’s different periods.

Another vital relationship for his painting was the one he established based on his knowledge of graphic design. In this sense, names like Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand are crucial for understanding the evolution of Luis Seoane, who said that what most helped him develop his work as a mural painter were the front covers he made for publisher Botella al Mar. Of course, a list of these designers would not be complete without El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer and the Bauhaus school, along with the aforementioned Attilio Rossi, with whom Seoane shared discoveries. Seoane admired Kandinsky, Eisenstein, Freud, Kafka, the Irish poets; the music of Gaspard de la nuit, the paradoxes of Chesterton, the peasantry of Malevich, Japanese prints, the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of León, which he saw whilst traveling to meet with his Republican signing group, and Compostela and Catalan Romanesque art, among other things. Countless were his readings and writings, and he managed to distil them all from his own perspective, a communal perspective.

Argentina historian and critic Nelly Perazzo points out how the works of Luis Seoane act like echoes, ‘shock waves which, like the concentric circles that a stone creates when dropped in water, determine an ever deeper understanding of one of the most well-rounded artists the country has ever produced’. Therefore, as Rafael Squirru says, ‘in the case of Seoane it is not easy to find the tip of the iceberg’. Because these waves are not successive, but simultaneous. As if it were necessary to access Seoane from an actual Cubist perspective to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Certainly, it all comes together through its intended social sense: engraving for its ability to communicate and its traditional multiplicity, painting for its subjects, mural art for its integration into the community’s shared space, editorial design for its literary dimension and distribution, advertising for its ability to reach the masses, his editing work for its communicative reach and his work in radio are just some examples. Seoane is persistent in his priorities and constant in his aims to revive a mythical Galicia, Celtic, medieval, migrant, with combative warriors, peasants, fishermen and a community spirit. But it was mainly a matriarchal Galicia, symbolised by a woman, who waited to be released from her pain near the sea or in the doorway of her home.

In his works he was formally an artist who took a number of different paths. What remained a constant throughout his career was his subject and his ethic, socially and politically, like a chord held by harmonising different instruments and sounds. The subject was the seed, as he recognised in a letter to Carlos Maside. Galicia, its history, myths, jobs, customs, the rural world and the seafaring world, the Middle Ages, in short, the idiosyncrasies of its people, are issues that he incorporated and summarised in his tapestries, preparing an exhibition he was unable to see before he died and for which he only had a single tapestry left to do. But, as recognised on occasion, his main theme is the static nature of the human figure. These peasants and fishermen who wait and formulate a timeless image: Galicia.

There are, therefore, many ‘Seoanes’ in his paintings as well, which give meaning to those concentric circles. The most significant is how he works with large masses of saturated colour, almost always vivid and bright, a direct result of his relationship with the graphic arts and which work through opposition, through contrast. Over the colour, which serves as a structure, is the apparent freedom of the line, the virtually spontaneous graphics, never innocent but constructive, and black, which vibrates and hardens the message, the freshness and rhythm. It is curious how, in many cases, he presents faces from the front or side, an attitude inspired by Cubism but distilled in his own way. Seoane eludes to perspective to remind us of his origin, to honour the Romanesque, as a way to evoke the symbolic, the synthetic, the frontal, the sign. The reality of memory and reality of his present joined in painting far from a forced virtuosity. Luis Seoane sought out the basics, searched for the expressive with a flat painting that contains the magic of the essential, able to turn away from anecdote and detail in praise of primary colours, those of circus tents, of playing cards, which also inspired collections like his Mar Dulce for Editorial Nova. He occasionally borrowed El Lissitzky’s famous phrase ‘colour is a skin over a skeleton’ to clarify that he, in turn, strove to show the skeleton over the skin.

We can sense a sculptor in many of his paintings. Meanwhile, his conception of the book as a complete work of art, like architecture, leads us to understand engraving as a key and revolutionary element in transforming the sensibility of the people. It is contemporary artists who recover the book as art, and Seoane, as a graphic designer and master engraver, was one of the first. A book’s communicative ability to reach the masses, and its literary dimension, were keys he knew how to define to become one of the leading artists of his time. As Fernando Cordero de la Lastra says, ‘The importance of Seoane’s engravings —both individual prints and illustrations for books— within the framework of the artists of this century, can only be compared with those first made by Miró, with his almost three hundred illustrated books, or Picasso’. The direct communication engraving created between the artist and his people is something that Luis Seoane distilled from Castelao and Maside. Later, the emergence of different graphic techniques, especially in the fifties, intensified his efforts as an engraver to become, by quantity and quality, the key to his work. He engraved as one plows, as one styles, using the texture of wood, its shades of colour, its grains. The material is an element of painting, a resource. Besides wood, the most common support he used was linoleum or stencil, or collages combining wood and metal, using nails and sharp objects for a scratched effect.

Luis Seoane loved the miniatures of the Calixtino Codex and the Cantigas of Alfonso X of Castille. He was familiar with the work of Dürer, Munch, Gauguin, Romanesque and Gothic books, breviaries. Of course, his perspective was influenced by the achievements of Matisse and Picasso. Everything comes together and becomes intertwined in Luis Seoane, because he always had a critical eye and his intellectual training was relentless. In his painting can be found hints of his engraving, his graphic work for advertising borrows planes from his still lifes and these, in turn, are a result of his books. His entire body of work is a kind of synthesis. Guillermo Whitelow noted that, sometimes, ‘some of his oil paintings seem to be infected by the line, the nervousness found in the essence of carved wood, which innervates the metal plate, which inlays the linoleum’. Because it is in the engravings where his projects his fantasy, where he lets loose his pace, and the Celtic line, enigmatic, is distilled with expressionist emotion. Meanwhile, in his murals, Luis Seoane handled materials with unique skill, seeking to project the mystery behind the history of each, the transparent relief of stained glass, the deconstructive history of the mosaic, the craftsmanship in pottery, in crushed stone. All combined with new materials such as cement and iron, respecting the quality of each material as he did with the wood and its laws in his engravings.

Lorenzo Varela described the spirit of Seoane as medieval and restless. Varela confessed it took time for him to understand that Seoane was neither Spanish nor Argentine, but a nationality to which many children of immigrants belonged: the Galician Creole. For Varela, Seoane had a double nostalgia, a double hope, a double human condition: the Celtic Galicia and the Creole Argentina. But his universality is expressed by his attitude above all, because nothing is foreign. Varela spoke of how he was introduced to Federico García Lorca on the stage of the Teatro Español. ‘Practically the first thing he talked about, after exchanging some first polite words, was a great artist, an amazing kid from Santiago de Compostela... Luis Seoane’. He mentioned with special affection his friend Marino Dónega on the day of his funeral in the San Amaro cemetery in A Coruña. ‘Luis Seoane was excessive in everything. Excessive in his Galician patriotism, his art, the cultural activity, friendships. On the other hand, his art was always measured, balanced, transparent, naked, supremely elegant’.

Luis Seoane. Retrato de esguello [Luis Seoane. Askance Portrait] brings together Seoane’s artwork, editorial projects and graphic documents that span his beginnings as a commercial artist and designer in Galicia to his gradual return late in life. His drawings, travels, watercolours, books, paintings, the evolution of his own unique style, the chromatic quality of his tapestries, his pottery, posters, stories, prints, poetry, murals...everything fits when one looks askance and discovers that, to Luis Seoane, a head is never just a head, and can be unfolded from the front and from the side’.

David Barro