Painting and Thought in Ramon Gaya

Abstract

Gaya’s work, silenced during the long years of the Spanish dictatorship, is linked to the city of Valencia. There, at the request of the author of this article, the painter published in La Caña Gris, in1961, a text whose final title was “The original fruit.” Valencia, converted into the intellectual and moral capital of the anti-fascist Europe, welcomed Ramón Gaya in 1937 and, after his return from exile, the painter spent many seasons there making it finally his last residence. It was in this town where Gaya with a group of artists and intellectuals, founded Hora de España, the great republican journal of essays, poetry and criticism, which Gaya, as Juan Gil- Albert and Maria Zambrano, was one of his key figures. In line with the humanist spirit of the collective presentation by the editorial board at the Second International Writers Congress, coordinated by the International Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals, Gaya’s work does not accept that the real is humiliated and, far from external realism, his work gets away from the trivial and affected styles of “artistic” art, while opening to a metaphysical realism, “beyond art.