May 18, 2005

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

THE PAINTER CIGA AND HIS DISCIPLES

Master Ciga as seen by his disciples

Mr. Javier Zubiaur Carreño.

Javier Ciga Echandi (Pamplona, 1877-Pamplona, 1960), after his return from Paris, where he extended programs of study of painting after those of Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of San Fernando (Madrid), opened a studio for the training of young aspiring painters in the street Navarrería issue 19, 1º of his hometown, Pamplona. At that time, the capital had no other center of training than the official School of Arts and Crafts, located at place del Vínculo, where a subject of teaching focused on Figure Drawing and Adorno, destined for the most part to attend to the needs of artisan workers and of the emerging industry and commerce, but it lacked a center of training for painter-artists, once the studio of Inocencio García Asarta was closed around 1908, and this lack will be the one that Ciga will come to cover.

From 1916 to 1936, Crispín Martínez, Gerardo Lizarraga, Julio Briñol, Elena Goicoechea, Pedro Lozano de Sotés and Karle de Garmendía passed through Ciga's studio at Calle Navarrería 19, 1º. attendance When the civil war ended, Ciga moved the studio to his home in Sangüesa Street 9, 2º, where José María Ascunce, Miguel Ángel Echauri, Jesús Lasterra, José Antonio Eslava, Salvador Beunesa and José Antonio Eslava went to study -simultaneously sometimes to the School of Arts and Crafts- and where they went to the School of Arts and Crafts, José Antonio Eslava, Salvador Beunza, Gloria Ferrer, Pedro Manterola, Isabel Peralta and Javier Suescun, as well as Nicolás Ardanaz, Pedro Irurzun and Félix Aliaga, who would eventually abandon their brushes to "paint" with their cameras. His disciples included future architects such as Francisco Javier Sarobe, as well as other occasional students such as Pedro María Irujo, a cellmate during the master's stay in the Provincial Prison of Pamplona, where he entered in 1938 accused of facilitating the escape of nationalists to France, and José María Apezetxea during Ciga's summer breaks in Elizondo in the 1940s.

The format of his academy was adjusted to the Parisian petit atelier model and his pedagogical method followed the successive stages of learning to see nature to capture the differences between different lights or between apparently equal objects, followed by the internship of charcoal or pencil drawing on plaster models and oil painting, in a last phase, with still life and figure representation, on live models.
The lecture focused on how the disciples saw their master, following the testimony of his students, who acknowledge having benefited from his training on a human and technical level. If in the first aspect, Ciga tried to promote his students by encouraging them to open their horizons outside Navarre -mainly by attending the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid- for which he did not hesitate to convince their families and public bodies that could give them scholarships, in the second he provided them with the technical baggage useful for their profession: "not to see more than necessary" when confronted with representation; technique as "an essential vehicle for the expression of sensitivity"; "visualize the problem and capture it with a very short range of color"; "to blur you must first know how to draw", were sentences that Ciga repeated incessantly.

The author concludes that, on the whole, the master did not condition the way his disciples painted, since he chose to train people-artists rather than followers, and that he contributed two heritages: his own, that of his work, and a living heritage, that of his disciples, and that of their disciples, which have branched out to form today the thick blanket of contemporary art in Navarre.