Artists Biography
Carlos Nadal
Spanish 1917-1998
His father, Santiago Nadal had a commercial design studio, making posters and theatre backdrops which in the early 1920s was a lucrative business. It was here that Carlos not only learned to paint, but met modern artists including Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Utrillo.
As well as the informal education from his father’s business, he studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona gaining entry when he lied about his age - being only thirteen at the time - and at the Senior Fine Art Academy of St George, also in Barcelona in 1932.
He was conscripted into the Spanish Republican Army and fought in the Spanish Civil War, including imprisonment and escape from the concentration camp at St Cyprien, before finally returning to his art studies and, in 1942, having his first solo exhibition at La Pinacoteca in Barcelona.
At the end of the Second World War, Nadal returned to Paris with a small scholarship from Barcelona Council. He additionally received a grant from the French Ministry of Culture. He began studies in the atelier of Ossip Zadkine, where he met his wife-to-be, a Belgian art student called Flore Augusta Zoe Joris.
Nadal was particularly influenced by Henri Matisse whom he met as a child, and Georges Braque who was a close acquaintance in the 1940s and maintained a love of the Fauvist style.
His early work was mainly of scenes in Spain or Belgium but when established as a successful artist he travelled extensively, making paintings which often featured modes of transport as well as leisure scenes.
Although, by this time, Abstraction was becoming the genre of choice, Nadal never lost his passion for the Fauvist movement and in a series of later paintings Homage to My Friends he captured both Fauvism and Cubism within a single canvas.
In 1949 Nadal was offered a US scholarship by the Carnegie Foundation but instead chose to marry Flore, by now a sculptor, moving with her to Brussels where he took up a contract with the art dealer Louis Manteau. He became friends with Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte, who was Nadal’s neighbour.
Louis Manteau gave the Nadals use of a house on the Cote d'Azur near Villauris and there Nadal painted many of his Mediterranean works. It was here that Manteau introduced Nadal to Picasso and the two Spaniards became good friends, sometimes visiting Matisse, who was by now unwell.
In 1957 Nadal was commissioned to decorate the Belgian Pavilion at the World Atom Fair in Switzerland and then in 1958 to paint a large continuous mural for the Belgian Congo Transport Company at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, consisting of 320 square metres of continuous painting.
By the Sixties, Nadal was in great demand for exhibitions in Europe, although little known in Britain. At last he had enough money to build his own studio and summer house near Barcelona.
After several shows in the provinces, the Harrogate International Festival invited Nadal to hold a retrospective in 1984. An exhibition followed in 1987 at the Solomon Gallery, in London.
The first UK auction of Nadal’s work was at Christie’s, London in 1983 - the two paintings sold were La Terraza and Los Pirineos.
Flore Joris died on 30 April 1988 and Carlos Nadal died on 06 June 1998. They had two children; a daughter, Marina, in 1955 and a son, Alexandre, in 1957.