Rosario De Velasco: Biography Of This Forgotten Spanish Painter

Rosario de Velasco Belausteguigoitia (1904-1991) is one of the many women artists forgotten by time. In her case, her ideology did not help her; openly linked to Falangism and a friend of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, after the dictatorship her work remained more or less hidden, until, in 2024 (exactly 120 years after her coming into the world) the Thyssen Museum in Madrid has decided to make a monograph of his artistic career, not without controversy.

Regardless of Rosario de Velasco’s ideology, the truth is that she was an extraordinary painter who knew how to combine in her work much of the European avant-garde heritage, as well as the most classicist tradition. Despite her religious and conservative convictions, she was a rebellious and independent woman, who always claimed equality between the sexes, a role she defended throughout her life through what she loved most in the world and with which she made a place for herself in the world. cultural panorama of the Republic and, later, of the postwar period: painting. Today we bring you a biography of Rosario de Velasco the magnificent and forgotten Spanish painter.

Brief biography of Rosario de Velasco, forgotten Spanish painter

During his lifetime, Rosario participated in numerous exhibitions and acquired notable fame. However, since her death in 1991, her name has been diluted and she has entered the list of sadly forgotten female artists. With this biography we intend to join the Thyssen exhibition and vindicate her magnificent work.

A cultural and refined atmosphere

Rosario de Velasco Belausteguigoitia came into the world in Madrid in 1904, within a very religious and traditional family. His father, Antonio de Velasco, was a military man, and was also a professor at the Higher War School. Her mother, Rosario Belausteguigoitia, came from a family from Bilbao, although chance wanted her to be born in Cantabria, during a family vacation.

The De Velasco family promoted a cultured and refined environment in which they raised their three children: Lola, Rosario and Luís. Antonio de Velasco spoke English fluently and was a great reader, also fond of painting, which made him wish for an artistic destiny for his daughter. However, Mr. De Velasco would have preferred a more academic training for his second son, and Rosario’s subsequent orientation towards “modern” painting did not please him too much. Despite everything, and true to her spirit, he supported her without hesitation.

Along with culture and artistic taste, Rosario’s family was filled with great religiosity, which she inherited and preserved until the end of her days. His ultra-Catholicism did not deprive him, however, of developing an absolutely independent and autonomous personality. and from a very young age she positioned herself in a feminist ideology that placed women on the same level as men.

First works and first successes

After studying with the painter Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, a very young Rosario rents a small studio in Madrid, where she retires to execute her first works and receive friends and family, who often pose for her. Her success came soon: in 1924, at barely twenty years old, the young painter participated in her first exhibition, with the works Old Segovian and Clutch Boy.

This first stage of the artist is characterized by a notable influence of Noucentisme and regionalism. Her paintings present strong, well-modelled figures, imbued with evident classicism. Her first great success was her work Adam and Evein which we see a young man and a girl stretched out on the grass and which received, along with excellent reviews, the second medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. It seems that De Velasco was destined to receive the first prize, but the lack of history of a woman winning the award made the jury lean towards the second prize.

Adam and Eve It is much more than what the title expresses. A couple appears in a relationship of equality and, furthermore, expressing their love in public, a common theme among intellectuals of the time; especially among women artists, who thus claimed their equality with their colleagues. In this sense, Rosario de Velasco was an eminently advanced woman.

The disasters of war

If Rosario de Velasco’s pictorial work has remained forgotten, let alone her role as an illustrator. In 1927 he worked as such in The sphereand, the following year, we find her illustrating Stories to dreama book that sought to renew children’s literature and that Rosario created together with her friend María Teresa León, a writer belonging to the generation of ’27 who, later, would be Rafael Alberti’s partner. Both collaborate again two years later, in The beauty of lovesicknessan allegation to female dissatisfaction.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the specter of the civil war is more present than ever, and ideologies become radicalized. While María Teresa León opts for communism, Rosario de Velasco, who is at the opposite end, sympathizes with the recently created Falange and, especially, with its Women’s Section. According to the artist, this first Falange (created by another of her friends, José Antonio Primo de Rivera) was faithful to the spirit in which she believed, the participation of women in the creation of a new society, something that, she maintained, in The Franco era was forgotten.

Be that as it may, the painter’s Falangist support did not sit well with everyone. There is an episode, narrated by the artist’s grandson in the biography of her that he prepared (see bibliography), that tells how Rosario saw from the balcony some nuns who were cruelly rebuked. To defend them and scare away their attackers, the artist shouted at them from the balcony, while she threw light bulbs at them. Later, The building’s concierge denounced Rosario, and she, faced with possible reprisals from the left, decided to flee Madrid.

Settling in with friends in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres (Barcelona), there she met the man who would later become her husband, the Catalan doctor Javier Farrerons. But, for the moment, Rosario is accused of being a Falangist and imprisoned in the Modelo de Barcelona. The artist was saved from the death sentence in a truly novel way: Farrerons came to her aid and, in collaboration with a prison doctor colleague, they sneaked Rosario out in a wheelbarrow. The companion with whom she had shared a cell was indeed shot, an event that the painter always remembered with great sadness. His famous canvas The slaughter of the innocentdated to the year the war broke out (1936), is considered a kind of gloomy omen of the blood spilled in the conflict.

New life in Barcelona

After marrying their savior, Rosario and Javier flee to France and then return to Spain through rebel territory. In 1938, the couple’s only daughter, María del Mar, was born. Later, once the war was over, the family settled permanently in Barcelona, ​​where Farrerons was originally from and where he worked as a doctor.

In 1942, the public attended the artist’s first independent exhibition, at the Augusta Galleries from Barcelona. Rosario’s artistic activity in these years is intense: In addition to her activity as a painter, she attends cultural gatherings with numerous acquaintances from the world, among whom is the Catalan writer Eugeni D’Ors.

Of conservative convictions and very Catholic, Rosario never believed, however, in the Franco regime, which she accused of “adulterating” the essence of the Falange. In fact, she always criticized the machismo of the dictatorship and its intention to limit women to household chores, which, for a soul as restless as Rosario’s, was inconceivable.

In the 1960s, Rosario de Velasco began to cultivate a much freer style. Specifically, she definitively frees herself from classicism and immerses herself in various avant-garde aesthetics, such as the surrealist. with his work The red house In 1968 he received the Sant Jordi prize, and in 1971, the Biosca gallery in Madrid organized an individual exhibition of his work.

Portrait of an artist

Her grandson, the art historian Víctor Ugarte Farrerons, wrote an interesting profile of his grandmother (see bibliography) in which he describes her as a woman always attentive to her physical appearance, who wanted it to be unbeatable on all occasions. Perhaps this discreet coquetry was what led Rosario to put off those who wanted to know her age, because, when she was asked about it, she maintained that the documents “had been burned in the war.” Perhaps for this reason, in many sources 1910 is recorded as her date of birth, no less than six years later than the correct date.

Very cultured, refined and lover of art, Rosario de Velasco admired Mantegna, Masaccio and Giotto and, of course, Goya and Velázquez. Her initial classicism, however, was not an impediment for her to also be passionate about Giorgio de Chirico, the great master of the so-called “metaphysical painting,” and also Picasso, of whom she stated that “all artists owe him something.” In sum, Rosario de Velasco knew how to combine the classicism of the first decades of the 20th century with the newest avant-garde currents. and all thanks to his awake, curious and rebellious character.

At his death in 1991, he continued painting. Not even Alzheimer’s had been able to handle his vocation. Now, after some decades submerged in oblivion, Rosario de Velasco returns to the list of artists of the 20th century.