May 17, 2005

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

THE PAINTER CIGA AND HIS DISCIPLES

The painter Javier Ciga

Mrs. Carmen Alegría Goñi.
Art Historian.

The trajectory of Javier Ciga (1877-1960) is analyzed, framed within an era in which art was discussion between tradition and renovation, and his role as a precursor of contemporary painting in Navarre.

He is an artist of solid academic training received from Eduardo Carceller at the School of Arts and Crafts of Pamplona and the painters Enrique Zubiri and Inocencio García Asarta, which he later completed in Madrid at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando and with the study of the great masters of the Golden Age at the Prado Museum.

From agreement with this learning, Ciga opted for a style in accordance with the dominant aesthetic in official circles and with the tradition of Spanish painting; a style faithful to reality, with a firm and detailed drawing, a sober coloring and a studied projection of light.

He took contact with the pictorial modernity in Belgium and Germany and especially in Paris, which made him interested in the impressionist discoveries that he groped especially in the urban landscape. But by then Ciga's direction was already set and Paris did not change his style. Once again he stuck to the traditional formula in "El Mercado de Elizondo", a work that was admitted to the Paris Spring 1914 exhibition , a success for the painter that was echoed by all the Navarrese press of the time.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Ciga settled permanently in Navarre, at a time when the economic, social and cultural circumstances were not suitable for the development of a rich intellectual life or to facilitate the progress of artists. A status that had already caused the dispersion of most of the Navarrese painters to other geographical points of the country and that will also determine, to a certain extent, Ciga's career and his rather traditional aesthetic orientation, in line with the tastes of the Pamplona society of the time.

His abundant work covers all genres. Religious, historical, mythological, nude and still life themes are treated very punctually. More free and innovative was sample in his landscapes of Baztanes where he experimented, albeit timidly, with the sensations apprehended from the new European aesthetics. He stood out especially in the costumbrista scenes of clear ethnicist interest ("Un Viático en el Baztán", 1917) and in his splendid portraits where he masterfully shades all the details that define physically and psychically the portrayed ("Portrait of Don Estanislao de Aranzadi", "Fely, girl from Elizondo").

His imprisonment during the Civil War marked a hard and painful parenthesis in Ciga's life and marked the beginning of a certain decline in his work of the last years, which is somewhat more uneven in quality than that of previous years.