Word: palencia
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Last summer, at Venice's big Biennale, gallerygoers got a glimpse of a fresher trend in Spanish painting, the work of a stay-at-home named Benjamin Palencia. Palencia's boldly colored, unsophisticated commentaries on Spanish country life were neither hidebound nor self-consciously revolutionary. This spring when Palencia, now 50, had a one-man show at Madrid's Museum of Modern Art, critics boasted: "Spain has a great new painter . . . the richest temperament since Goya...
...Palencia began his straightforward observations of rural Spain as a child herding sheep on the arid plain of La Mancha, where Don Quixote started on his famous travels. At nine, Palencia's sketches of animals and lively peasant fiestas caught the eye of Don Rafael López Egoniz, a well-to-do Spanish engineer and art collector. He persuaded Benjamin's parents to let him take the youngster back to Madrid as his ward. There he set the boy to studying the great Spanish masters, but carefully kept him out of Madrid's traditionalist art schools...
This week, with his successful Madrid show behind him, Palencia is still in search of beauty. From his summer headquarters in an old mill on a hilltop near Avila, he starts out each morning accompanied by an old shepherd who guides him along mountain trails until he finds some scene that catches his eye. By autumn, he hopes to have 30 or 40 new sun-and space-filled canvases for next year's show in Madrid. "I am still far from reaching total maturity," says white-haired Palencia. "But I am on the right path...
...lace, formerly thought to have been unknown before the 16th Century, was found in the tombs, as was cloth from China. Until the opening of the Las Huelgas sarcophagi, Spanish historians had not been absolutely sure whether Enrique I of Castile died from a blow on the head at Palencia in 1217, or from natural causes. Enrique's skull, found in the tomb, confirmed the theory of violent death; it also showed what archeologists interpreted as advanced techniques of trepanation, demonstrating a medieval knowledge of surgery hitherto unsuspected...
Living Spirit. In other Latin American countries - Cuba, Chile, Colombia, and even Argentina - smaller colonies worked hard "keeping alive the spirit of Republican Spain." And in Russia thousands of Spanish children were housed and educated. Socialist-minded Diplomat de Palencia does not dwell on the political activities of the Republic's refugees, does her best to lay the bogey of Communism that has so damaged the Loyalist cause in America. But her book leaves no doubt that doctrinal disputes mean far less to her than does a united front to carry the smouldering torch of freedom back to Spain...