Discover more from VQT - BLOG: MENTES LUCIDAS
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Miguel Orozco
Miguel Orozco
Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1953, Orozco studied at Ramiro de Maeztu college and then at the Faculty of Political Science of Complutense University in Madrid (Masters in International Studies and in Latin American Studies). He briefly taught at his alma mater and completed his PhD courses in 1983. Having left the university to pursue a career in journalism, he did not complete his doctoral thesis, although he obtained other postgraduate diplomas in international studies. As a journalist in the 1970's and early 1980's, he was Africa correspondent for the Madrid-based "Actualidad Política Extranjera"; special correspondent for London-based "New African", analyst for the daily "El País" and a regular contributor for "Triunfo", "La Calle", "Historia 16", etc. In 1986 he joined an international organisation, where he worked in communication jobs until his retirement in 2012. A collector of art since the 1980's (mainly "livres d'artiste" and original graphic work of the great masters of the twentieth century), since retirement he started compilating in books what he had learnt in decades of contacts and often friendship with the main merchants in the trade (e.g. Arik Verezhensky of Gemini books in Chicago and Lucien Desalmand of Arenthon in Paris) and with people who had collaborated with Picasso, Miró, Braque, etc in the print works of Fernand Mourlot. The first result of this work was his book "Picasso Litógrafo y Militante" (WorldCat No. 952991448), the first commented catalogue raisonné of Picasso litographs, published by the Picasso Foundation in 2016. The book reveals for the first time the reasons and circumstances of Picasso’s lithographic career, overcoming the painter’s attempts to hide the facts, and particularly Georges Braque’s role in the introduction. It also uncovers a formerly unknown new aesthetics developed by Picasso for years, and his motivations to do it: to mock the Communist Party and its pressure on the painter to adopt socialist realism. The aesthetic starts with the catalog of arbitrary signs contained in the 125 lithographs of the book Le Chant des Morts, and its best known oil painting examples are the two versions of La Cuisine. His second book, about Joan Miró, “La Odisea de Miró y sus Constelaciones” (WorldCat No. 967285228, ISBN: 9788498956757) was published in November 2016 and provides new and surprising evidence on how the official painter's biography has very little to do with real historical facts, as it has hidden key events in Miró’s life, like his fleeing Republican Catalonia in 1936 after the revolutionary militias murdered his brother in law and threatened to kill him too. The famous works Aidez l’Espagne and The Reaper were actually the price he paid to the republican authorities for his freedom and that of his wife and daughter. As soon as General Franco won the war, Miró returned to Spain, where he lived quietly, helped young artists, and cooperated with the dictatorship’s museologist establishment (as well as with MoMA and the U.S. authorities) in promoting them. In view of the historical facts, the book calls for a re-assessment of, i.a., the peintures sauvages of 1934-1940. It provides also, for the first time a detailed description of how the Constellations series got into the U.S.; how it was underestimated by his art dealer Pierre Matisse, by the MoMA and main collectors; and reveals the true names and stories of the great American women that patronized the series and made them one of the most famous works of art of the XXth century. He has continued to write catalogues raisonnées of the graphic works of his favourite painters, uncovering hundreds of hitherto unknown prints and states of painters like Picasso, Braque, Bacon, Villon...