Enrique Grau

Biography

In 1957 Grau won the first national prize for painting at the Tenth National Salon of Colombian Artists. The prize went to his painting “Elements Under an Eclipse”. He was thirty-six, and by then he had already lived in New York, Bogotá and Florence.

He was born on 18 December 1920 to Colombian parents: his father was Enrique Grau Vélez, his mother Carmen Araújo Jiménez. His birthplace is most often given as Panama (Panama City), but sources differ, and Cartagena also appears. He grew up in Cartagena, and that city remained central to him.

He had no formal art training in his youth and taught himself; among those said to have influenced him are the Colombians Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Pedro Nel Gómez. In 1940 his work was shown at the first Salon of Colombian Artists, and he received a scholarship to study in New York. At the Art Students League he studied painting and printmaking, and his teachers included the German émigré George Grosz. The year of his departure is not known exactly: both 1940 and 1941 are given. Returning in 1943, he settled in Bogotá and became close to a group of young artists that included Alejandro Obregón, Édgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez. His early work is also linked to the circle of writers and artists known as the Barranquilla Group, which included Gabriel García Márquez and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio.

In these years he tried different manners: Expressionism, Surrealism, abstraction. In 1950–1952 and 1957–1963 he taught painting and printmaking at the National University in Bogotá, and in 1961–1963 also at the University of the Andes. In 1953 he went to Mexico and saw the work of the Mexican muralists; in 1954 or 1955 he left for Florence. At the San Marco school he learned etching and fresco. There Picasso and Cubism made a strong impression on him, which shows in the painting “The Fortune Teller of Florence” (1955). In 1956 he exhibited in Paris, and in 1957 for the first time in the United States, in Washington and New York. He also visited the Middle East, above all Egypt.

From 1959 his manner changed: Grau moved away from Cubism to figurative painting with rounded volumes, geometric forms and rhythmic composition, and worked in a range of graphic techniques, including pastel. “Homage to Delacroix” (1961) is regarded as the programmatic work of this turn. In 1958 he won the Salon’s first prize for drawing, and in 1962 the prize of the Ministry of Education.

His fame came from figures of white, Black and Indigenous people placed beside masks, eggs, fruit and cages. His work was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. To my mind, what matters most in these scenes is not the subjects but the objects: a cage beside a body says more than any explanation.

In the late 1980s Grau turned to sculpture. At first he built assemblages from antique and industrial objects, then moved on to cast bronze. He also worked as a stage designer and filmmaker. In his last years he painted tropical flora and fauna, among them the series “The Little Voyage of Baron von Humboldt”.

In Cartagena he was one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art: in the early 1970s he did much to help organise it, and from 1972 to 1992 he was its director. He gave the city about 1,300 paintings and sculptures, some of them by other artists. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cartagena (1969), a medal of the Colombian Institute of Culture (1986), in 1991 the highest grades of two national orders, and the title of honorary citizen of Cali.

Enrique Grau died on 1 April 2004 in Bogotá. His house in Cartagena has operated since 2008 as the Casa Grau museum.