The Dance By Gil Franco Oil On Canvas

Vicente Gil-Franco showed a talent for drawing and painting as a child, which led him to study fine arts in Valencia and then in Barcelona. At the age of twenty, deeply anti-militaristic, he left Spain, crossed the border during the grape harvest, to go to Paris and then to the north of France. He stayed in Lille where he perfected his sculpture technique. At this time, he met Dr. Vrasse. In 1926, the latter invited him to Boulogne-sur-Mer. He stayed there for three months and then moved to Equihen where he took a studio. There, he painted many landscapes and scenes from the life of fishermen. In 1936, he returned to Spain to serve the Spanish Republic. As Commissioner for National Education, he joined the Republican propaganda campaign and notably produced a series of postcards whose sales were intended to help the fighters on the front. During this period he produced a number of postmodernist paintings, drawings and engravings in which he expressed his horror of war. The works of this period are animated by a passion and ardor imbued with the works of Goya and the Mexican muralists. He exhibited alongside Picasso's Guernica at the Spanish pavilion of the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Paris in 1937 as well as at the "Sala de Exposiciones de las Juventudes Libertarias" in Barcelona under the title of "Exposicion de Arte Revolucionario de Gil-Franco", the National Art Museum of Catalonia holds works exhibited at these two exhibitions in its collections. Driven out of Spain in 1938 by Franco's repression, he settled in Pont-de-Briques, in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Most of his works produced in Spain were destroyed during the bombing of the region in May 1940. The few works from this period on the market are among the rare survivors of this period. Like his compatriot Picasso, he was worried by the police of the occupier for his participation in the republican fight against Francoism, it is for this reason that, harassed by the bombings and the humiliations of the Gestapo, he left in 1943 to settle with his wife in the Rodez region, in Clairvaux where the eldest of his children, Catherine, was born. From 1944 to 1947, Gil-Franco remained in Franconville at the invitation of the lyrical artist Roger Bourdin. He worked little during this period except for a series of woodcuts on the horror of the concentration camps, which the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris acquired years later. Around 1945 it is his cubist period (Catherine Gil Franco, daughter and beneficiary of the artist) It is a synthetic cubism combining beautiful pastel colors and the search for movement, undoubtedly in reference to his past acquaintances but also to the psychological liberation of the end of the war. These cubist works, both pictorial and sculptural, are rare. He returned to Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1947 and held a first exhibition in his personal gallery, which was a great success. which led him to do the frescoes of the bar of the Coliséum, one of the city's cinemas. From then on, he worked hard until 1958 to depict the daily life of the people of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais seaside through painting, engraving, bas-reliefs and a large production of ceramics (Exhibitions in Lille, Ghent, participation in the Menton Biennale, the Salon de l'Art Libre). Vicente Gil-Franco died in Boulogne-sur-Mer on November 6, 1959; in homage to his work, the city dedicated a square to his name a few years later.