“I am looking for work by my great aunt Rosario de Velasco, a great artist of the 30’s, today forgotten. The one above is her signature. Write to me at toyaviudes67@gmail.com.” Toya Viudes de Velasco’s biography on her X profile -formerly Twitter- is a true reflection of her offline biography: more than 20 years dedicated to making known the name and recovering the work of the painter who signed her paintings with the monogram RDV in reddish tones. The same one who had been for her, simply, her great-aunt Rosario.
In the family, he recalls in a telephone conversation with this media, they were not always aware of the transcendence of his work and for a long time the recognition was summarized in an affectionate comment from behind closed doors: “How well Aunt Rosario painted”. That is what Toya thought of her great-aunt, whom she never knew during her lifetime, every time she saw the huge painting of The Washerwomen ( 1934) that presided over the living room of her family home. But his interest, he says, did not go beyond that.
The painting had been a wedding gift that Rosario had given to her brother Luis (Toya’s maternal grandfather) and with it in the background, as a silent witness -and in a certain way, paradoxically invisible despite its dimensions-, she grew up: first it decorated her grandparents’ house in Valencia, then -after her grandmother was widowed- the work traveled to Murcia and, finally, it entered her parents’ house.
The reality to which they remained oblivious was that they had a painting that could be part of a museum collection. And in fact, some of them already did: it was during her stay in Madrid to study journalism when Toya discovered that the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía was exhibiting the Adam and Eve (1932) that her great-aunt had painted.
With this painting Rosario won the second medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1932, “but the chronicles of the time say that she was not awarded the first medal because she did not win it there was no precedent for being a woman“, adds Toya. Symbolically it also has another value: “I always say that he didn’t let it die at all, because when he won the award it went into state funds. And in fact I am told that it is one of the best-selling postcards of the Reina Sofia, but no one has any idea who Rosario de Velasco was”.
The journey: from Twitter to a museum
Until now, the family had not really been aware of the transcendence of his work: “As a family we are now realizing how important it was, especially in the 1930s. At the Society of Iberian Artists, the Venice Biennials, the… They were taking to Pittsburgh for the Carnegie Prize and Rosario was exhibiting in the same room as Dalí,” he says. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t let this go”.
The task ahead, to locate Rosario’s lost work, was not an easy one. How do you search for paintings of which, in many cases, there were hardly any records? After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, took to Twitter the date was May 20, 2023 – coinciding with what would have been the artist’s birthday – and, as if to match the date with a gift, the response was overwhelming: “People came out in force, you can’t imagine what it was like,” she says gratefully.
The appeal, amplified by Programs such as A vivir que son dos días, the media and users who found it in their timelines, achieved the improbable: not only the appearance of works of which I was aware, but also others of whose existence I was unaware. And it continues to happen: yesterday, just hours before the opening of the exhibition, the following was located another work of the artist.
The success of the process, he is clear, would have been impossible rather than improbable had it not been for “a conglomerate of wills”: to Cabo de Palos, the town in Murcia where Toya landed after many years living in Colombia, came the cultural manager Miguel Lusarreta. It was he who proposed to send her the project of an exhibition to the Thyssen: “I thought they weren’t going to pay any attention to us. But he thought big, and when we talked to Guillermo Solana, the museum’s artistic director, he asked me why it had taken him so long to go.”
Rosario de Velasco at the Thyssen
After her death, and despite the fact that she had known success during her lifetime, “nobody started to recover her legacy or talk about her , and time ate away at her and her name was forgotten,” regrets her great-niece. Almost as an act of remembrance, his name is the only thing that headlines the exhibition in her Honor that the Thyssen is hosting from June 18 to September 15. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Let people pronounce it, say it out loud. To be remembered. And to relate it to his work.
“It’s no longer just giving it the place it deserves, but people can’t miss this. Never before have Rosario’s paintings from that early period been brought together,” he stresses. And, for the occasion, Toya highlights the restoration work carried out by the museum’s professionals: “Spectacular colors have come out.”
The works come from family and private collections that have been found and from museums around the world, as is the case of Carnival (1936), exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, which will be the first time it leaves the institution. There is also Adam and Eve and El cuarto de los niños (1932-1933) -both in the Queen Sofia– y Maragatos (1934), at the Museo del Traje in Madrid. And we could not miss the painting that has always been there, Lavanderas, which for the first time leaves the Velasco’s family environment.
A section of the exhibition is also dedicated to his illustrations, of which they have collected about thirty: “She illustrated the first edition of the book Cuentos para soñar ( 1928) by María Teresa León, were close friends. And we found the drawings in Burgos”.
Chronologically, for this first exhibition they wanted to focus on the first stage of his work, which goes from the 1920s to the mid-1940s. “Although she was painting until practically two years before her death. My idea is for that later work to be exhibited later, we now have over 300-odd paintings located.”
Rosario, who always had the support of her family to devote herself to painting, was taught by Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, director of the Prado Museum. In this first stage that the exhibition will show, he developed a style that, in the words of experts, exemplifies the so-called “return to order” in Spain: “a movement parallel to the German New Objectivity and the Italian Novecento, with a style that knew how to combine tradition and modernity”.
Looking back, Toya makes the following reading of the process: “There are a lot of older people who knew Rosario or family members I had no contact with who have told me about her as a result of this. Life has given me an opportunity: although I did not know her during her lifetime, I am now getting to know her through these testimonies, the newspaper archives and her paintings“.
Asked how she would like her great-aunt to be remembered, she replies: “As the very great woman artist she was. I believe that we owe special recognition to all those women of those years who fought so hard and who opened the way“.
After its visit to the Thyssen -where it will be installed after the successful exhibition dedicated to another Madrid painter, Isabel Quintanilla-The exhibition will be on display at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia from November 7, 2024 to February 16, 2025.
Tickets
The price of the general ticket is 13€ and 9€ in the case of the reduced ticket (for seniors over 65 and students). Visiting the museum is free on Mondays and Sundays saturday nights for all audiences. You can check all the rates at this link.