Notes

Antoni Clavé, born 5 April 1913, was a Spanish painter, printmaker, and set designer celebrated for his dark and mysterious abstractions. Clavé pursued formal training at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. After being forced to leave Spain during the civil war, he fled to France. While there, he became a stage designer and illustrator, creating sets for opera and ballet, and was nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design, for his work on the film Hans Christian Andersen (1952).

As an artist, Clavé developed his own style of collage using paint combined with materials such as wood and metal to create richly textured and layered compositions. He frequently employed newspapers and other printed materials in his works in a manner reminiscent of the French artist movement of Affichistes. His work can be described as unclassifiable and multidisciplinary, neither figurative nor abstract. He also prominently worked with collage and willingly indulged in the randomness of the medium. Additionally dabbled in sculpture, although he only took an interest in it at the beginning of his career and then much later.

The National Museum of Modern Art in Paris held a retrospective of his work in 1978. Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Paris Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Provenance

Private Collection, Cape Town.