Claudio Bravo

Biography

In 1945 nine-year-old Claudio Bravo, a native of Valparaíso (he was born on 8 November 1936), was sent from the family ranch to Santiago, to the Jesuit Colegio San Ignacio. He sang in the choir and loved literature and music, and his marks in mathematics, physics and chemistry, so it was later said, he mended in his own way: he gave the teacher a portrait. The school prefect, Father Dussuel, saw that the boy drew without any training and began paying for lessons in the studio of Miguel Venegas Cifuentes; later the cost was taken over by his father, Tomás Bravo, a businessman and ranch owner. Bravo studied with Venegas, a staunch defender of realism, from the age of eleven to twenty. He had no other art schooling.

He held his first exhibition at seventeen, in 1954, at the Salón 13 in Santiago. Everything sold, although the buyers were mostly relatives and friends.

In 1955 Bravo danced with the Chilean ballet company, worked for the Teatro de Ensayo of the Catholic University and showed again at the Salón 13. The poet and philosopher Luis Oyarzún took him hitchhiking across the whole country and taught him philosophy, art and life along the way; the writer Benjamín Subercaseaux made him read. At twenty-one Bravo began painting portraits in Concepción, commissions proved plentiful, and with his earnings he bought a passage on the Amerigo Vespucci, intending to go to Paris. The voyage was stormy: in Barcelona he went ashore, made his way to Madrid and stayed there.

In the Madrid of the 1960s he quickly became a fashionable portraitist, valued for his ability to achieve complete verisimilitude. A year and two months after arriving he was already painting Francisco Franco’s daughter, and to ladies of the nobility, it is said, he set a condition: before sitting, they had to buy a dress from Balenciaga, in whose cut he saw something of the Renaissance. The Prado became his school. From Velázquez he took light, from Zurbarán the folds of cloth, from Juan Sánchez Cotán and Juan van der Hamen the construction of a still life, from Luis Meléndez the rendering of texture. In 1963 his first exhibition in Spain was held at the Galería Fortuny in Madrid, and next to the portraits hung the first parcels: packages in wrapping paper, bound with string, painted so that one wants to touch the paper. To my mind he is freer in these canvases than in his commissioned portraits; he returned to the subject all his life, and “White and Yellow Package” dates from as late as 2005. In 1968 Ferdinand Marcos invited him to the Philippines to paint the president, his wife Imelda and Manila society. Bravo spent six months there, travelled and showed more than fifty works at the Luz Gallery in Manila; the light there, he said, was sharper than in Spain or Chile and changed his manner. Whether he did in the end paint the Marcoses themselves, the sources disagree.

In 1969, in Spain, he met the American collectors Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell, who collected figurative and Surrealist painting. They persuaded him to move to the United States and put him in touch with New York dealers; Bravo settled in an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. His first exhibition at the Staempfli Gallery in New York in 1970 drew enthusiastic reviews, among them one from the New York Times critic John Canaday. Years later the same Canaday would call his painting cheap and vulgar.

The grey concrete of New York and his social obligations in New York and Madrid kept him from working, and in 1972 Bravo left for Tangier. There he bought a three-storey nineteenth-century mansion, knocked down some of the walls and whitewashed the rest so that the Mediterranean light would enter the house. He had no plans to stay in Morocco, yet he lived there for the rest of his life: later came a winter house in Marrakesh and a third, built north of Taroudant. His routine was almost monastic: a walk in the garden in the morning, then many hours in the studio in front of the motif, more than eight hours a day. He did not paint from photographs, and although he is counted among the hyperrealists, he called himself rather a super-realist who needed the model before his eyes. In Morocco exotic objects joined the still lifes and parcels, along with biblical saints moved into a Moroccan world and Surrealist juxtapositions of things against dreamlike backgrounds. Bravo rejected the label of Orientalist: he thought of himself as a man interested in many cultures while belonging to none.

In 2000 he gave the Prado nineteen Greco-Roman sculptures from his collection; the oldest dates from the sixth century BC. On 24 May of that year, after the opening of the exhibition “The Claudio Bravo Donation”, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía presented him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise. Among those he painted were Malcolm Forbes and members of Franco’s family. Besides painting, he drew, made lithographs and engravings and cast figures in bronze. Works by Bravo are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago.

Claudio Bravo died on 4 June 2011 in Taroudant. He was buried in the palace he had built north of the town; it is now a museum bearing his name.