Alberto Sanchez Perez
Alberto Sánchez Pérez (Toledo, April 8, 1895-Moscow, October 12, 1962) was a Spanish sculptor and painter, spiritual father of the first Vallecas School, and vocal of the Board of Pedagogical Missions since 1931. Exiled in the USSR, he died in Moscow.
Biography
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Alberto Sánchez Pérez was born in Toledo on April 8, 1895, in the Covachuelas neighborhood. The son of a baker, at the age of seven he began working as a swineherd and then in various trades, bread delivery man, blacksmith's apprentice, shoemaker, and plasterer. From the age of 20 he was a baker by trade and an artist. In 1907 he moved with his family to Madrid where he learned to read and write at the age of 15 thanks to a friend who worked as a clerk in a pharmacy. In Madrid he entered the Socialist Youth where he met Francisco Mateos, a painter and caricaturist. He also became involved in the Círculo Socialista del Sur, which had its headquarters in the Lavapiés neighborhood, where they both lived. Together with Mateo, he designed a Casa del Pueblo, which would never be built. Between 1917 and 1919 he completed military service in North Africa. Five years after his military service, he was already participating in surrealist exhibitions in Madrid. In 1927 he created, together with Benjamín Palencia, the so-called Escuela de Vallecas, "with the deliberate purpose of setting up the new national art that would compete with that of Paris", according to his own words.
He was a regular visitor to Madrid's museums, especially the Prado Museum and the National Archaeological Museum, where he discovered Iberian art. He also used to participate in gatherings at the artists' café on the ground floor of the Hotel Nacional on Calle Atocha. A friend of Federico García Lorca, he made some sets for La Barraca .
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Alberto enlisted on the Guadarrama front, until, when the Republican government moved to Valencia, he moved there, where among other commissions he made the theatrical sets of El cerco de Numancia by Miguel de Cervantes and Las germanies de Valencia by José Bergamín and Manuel Altolaguirre.
In 1938 the bombs completely destroyed his small studio on Joaquín María López street in Madrid, and all the works that were in it. That year, the republican government sent him to Moscow as a drawing teacher for exiled Spanish children. One of his most important achievements in exile was the collaboration with the Russian director Grigori Kózintsev on the sets for the film Don Quixote (1957), a recreation of the towns of La Mancha in Ukraine. In Russia he also worked on the reconstruction of some of his destroyed sculptures. In an exhibition held in the Soviet Union in 1959, Ilyá Ehrenburg commented on Alberto: “What is most impressive here is that after twenty years of forced exile, Alberto is still Spanish and an artist on all four sides. He stubbornly Spanish and stubbornly an artist."
He died in Moscow on October 12, 1962. His remains remain in the Vvedénskoye cemetery in the Russian capital.
Work
Alberto Sánchez, called by his contemporaries simply as Alberto or even Alberto “El Socialista”, achieved his characteristic sculptural language through the fusion of elements of popular inspiration, with certain surrealist features worked in a stylized manner.[ citation required] During his early days he was greatly influenced by the Uruguayan Rafael Pérez Barradas, and his works from the 1920s are part of Cubism. He began to define himself with works such as the Maternity of 1929. That same year he participated in an open-air exhibition at the Botanical Garden in Madrid, later remembered by the then young Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza.
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Sánchez drew, painted, and sculpted many female figures. Other common motifs were cattle, such as the Iberian Bulls in the open-air museum on Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, and birds, such as the 15-meter-high sculpture The Monument to the birds, destroyed during the war. Pablo Neruda mentions him in his poem I was born to be born.
His best-known piece is perhaps The Spanish people have a path that leads to a star, selected by the Republican government as a beacon for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, in which Picasso's Guernica was also exhibited for the first time. About forty thousand visitors came to the exhibition. Closed, the obelisk of Alberto Sánchez disappeared.
In 1970 a model was found in the basement of the heritage building. And in 2001, for a large exhibition on Alberto's work, the Museo Reina Sofía erected an 18.7-meter-high copy of the work by the Valencian sculptor Jorge Ballester at the Museum's door. The facsimile was made based on the plaster model made by Alberto and on the surviving photographs of the original from Paris.
Subsequent acknowledgments
In 2002, on the occasion of the stopover in Toledo of the anthological exhibition dedicated to Alberto in various Spanish capitals, a tribute from his hometown was held at the Santa Cruz museum, attended by the sculptor's only son.
In 2010, it was planned to install a 15-meter-high work on the Almodóvar hill in Vallecas (Madrid) called The Monument to the Birds. It is about the reconstruction of a work by the artist that will be made with pieces that were deposited in Moscow. The sculptor wanted this work to be a refuge for the birds that inhabit the outskirts of Madrid. The previous version was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.