Colmeiro of Cunqueiro

The painter Manuel Colmeiro (Chapa, Silleda, 1901-Salvaterra de Miño, 1999) was one of the two great innovators of Galician painting, not abandoning his vital and spatial roots, but always submitting to a conscious and dedicated call to originality.

One of Colmeiro’s first admirers was the writer Álvaro Cunqueiro, who in 1933 dedicated an article to him in Bulletin of the University of Santiago de Compostela titled Colmeiro, painter. Nel announced that chegáralle is a Galician painting “a hora da ciencia paciencia”, da manda “esforzada paixón” de Colmeiro.

Cunqueiro felt a special calling for the work of Colmeiro. He observed the originality born of tradition “transformed, by the sum of possibilities, into a propensity for discovery.” Or that it could be, he said, “the philosophical alphabet of criticism of our painting”, because Galicia figured as the gravitational center of the creators from Pontevedra.

He was left before evolutions and breaks or the great Colmeiro, who emigrated to Buenos Aires as a young man, where he combined work with the study of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. The works he destroyed, almost all of them, when he became convinced that expressionism did not serve what he wanted.

Returning to Galicia in 1926, he exhibited in Vigo and received a scholarship at the Academia de San Fernando (Madrid). Six years later he participated in an exhibition at La Barraca de García Lorca. And, or the civil war started, he returned to Argentina in 1948. There he connected with Seoane, Dieste and Alberti. In 1949, he went to France, where in 1989 he was considered a great painter of the Spanish Paris School.

Atinou Cunqueiro when he discovered the artistic winning fund that Colmeiro maintains with his country. Because the painter never indulged in vanguard aesthetics. The writer from Mondoñedo was convinced in 1930! that Colmeiro would never abandon his painting credo. Neither with Buenos Aires, nor with Paris, nor with Picasso á beira, Colmeiro never renounced his flag. What Cunqueiro defined as originality born from tradition. For this reason, those in Vigo who dedicated two streets that connect to them were right.