Biographies

WORLD RECORD PRICE FOR OSCAR DOMINGUEZ

A 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez (1906-1958) titled «The Infernal Machine» and measuring 92 x 73 cm, fetched a world record price of
2 770 000 FF (US $ 404,375) (inclusive of buyer's premium) against a pre-sale estimate of only 450,000 FF on June 8th 2000 at Drouot-Montaigne in Paris.

The previous record for this artist stood at 1 345 000 FF ($ 196,350) for an untitled composition of 1935 measuring 80 x 50 cm sold in London in 1998.

Born in the island of Tenerife, Dominguez spent his youth with his grandmother in Taraconte and devoted himself to painting at a young age after suffering from a serious illness which affected his growth and caused a progressive deformation of his facial bone frame and limbs.

He went to Paris at 21 where he first worked for his father in the central market of les Halles but spent his nights drinking in cabarets. He then frequented some Fine Art schools and visited galleries and museums.

Dominguez was rapidly attracted by Surrealist painters, notably Tanguy, and Picasso whose influences were visible in his first works. At 25 he painted a self-portrait full of premonition as he showed himself with a deformed hand and with the veins of his arm cut. Strangely enough the artist chose to kill himself twenty-seven years later in cutting his veins.

He also invented during the 1930s a new transfer process which enabled him to produce spots or what he called «Desire Transfers» creating cosmic images and inducing Max Ernst to use such technique much.

Dominguez took part in the «Fantastic, Dada and Surrealist Art» exhibition in New York in 1936 and many others shows in Prague, Japan, Norway, Paris, Amsterdam and Mexico until 1942.

He however broke off relations with Breton after a violent row in 1945 and took part in many other exhibitions in Paris, Santiago, Chile, and New York while Brauner and Matta were excluded from the Surrealist group in 1948 as well as Ernst in 1954. Still, he had brought much to the Surrealist movement with his objects, his transfer technique and his much inventive works, which had a clear link with Dadaism.

His first Surrealist works were executed between 1930 and 1934. These were much naive and exotic in terms of style and exhaled somewhat the memory of his youth in Tenerife. Dominguez was then influenced by Salvador Dali from 1935 and improved his painting technique. He was then obsessed by female bodies, animal blood and the fusion of forms in a kind of organic decay. He also made frequent visits to the Canary islands, which were a great source of inspiration to him.

Dominguez was in addition a close friend of Picasso with whom he shared a passion for women and bullfights and worked under his influence after leaving the Surrealist movement giving more importance to plastic reality and restricting his inclination for fantasy though keeping quite a humorous touch in his works.

It was after 1940 that he started to work under the influence of Picasso with his «Calculations» series in which he represented leaning figures with distorted faces that he went on to transform in some sorts of sculptures likely to be taken into pieces. From 1943 he accentuated intersected rope-like lines or rays of light with obsessive themes introducing revolvers or telephones. In 1944, he painted bulls and five years later «eating fruit-dishes» simplifying forms and lines. During the last decade of his life he appeared more serene in his works showing windows opening on a clear sky, geometrical birds with wheels in suave colours.