The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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The anonymous author of this essay discusses landscapes by Enrique Climent, the painter living in exile, referring to the artist’s restraint and sparseness, and exemplifies, as in his painting of a simple track with a clump of trees to one side. The critic discusses the values of the artist’s forms and colors without mentioning his personal history or the trying circumstances of his life in exile. By focusing on the works themselves, the author finds that they hew closely to the strict paradigms of landscape painting.
The artist’s status as an exile is mentioned only once in the whole piece, when the writer mentions that his paintings do not express the unvarnished, obsessive yearning for Spain that is so apparent in the work of most migrant painters. The fact is that Valencia-born Enrique Climent (1897-1980) was one of the foreign painters who was best able to adapt to his new country, and who managed to absorb and express local light and color without losing his Spanish sense of self. Unlike many others, however, Climent was uninterested in political subject matter. To a certain extent, his style was more academic and he was more focused on himself; his work was suffused with warmth and originality that found immediate favor.