Esteban Vicente
Vicente was part of the post^-World War I movable feast that generated modern art. He traveled from the small Spanish town of his birth to Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, reaching his final destination, New York, in 1936, where he became one of the first abstract expressionists. He continues to explore this infinitely malleable form with fluency and an organic spirituality. Pulitzer Prize winner Frank summarizes Vicente's life quickly, then embarks on an in-depth analysis of his work. She notes that his early study of sculpture strongly influenced his painting, endowing it with substance no matter how atmospheric it became. Vicente honed his skill at conveying "movement and incident" in his early collages, which are so multidimensional they seem to pop right off their two-dimensional plane. This is due, in part, to the amazing luminosity of his colors; some canvases are so radiant they look like stained glass. In his later works, Vicente's deceptively simple compositions open up more and more, ultimately attaining a sense of floating, of cosmic phenomena, or even music. Frank's insightful commentary is matched by top-notch color reproductions.Donna Seaman