HERMENEGILDO ANGLADA CAMARASA (SPANISH, 1871-1959)

Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa settled in Paris in 1894 where he remained for 20 years. At the center of a radical circle of artists, his groundbreaking use of color and form influenced peers such as Picasso and Kandinsky and he exhibited widely — including in London, Berlin, Munich, Rome, Moscow, Zürich — winning the admiration of leading art critics and collectors such as Maxim Gorky and Sergei Diaghilev.
Highly expressionistic and notable for frieze-like, stylized compositions and shallow picture planes, Anglada's works during his Paris period were divided between canvases of his native Spain, which were almost Fauvist in color and others, such as the present work, which were inspired by la vie Parisienne and the demi-monde of Parisian night life.
The present work is dedicated to Marius-Ary Leblond, the pen name that the journalists, writers and art critics George Athénas and Aimé Merlo wrote under collectively. Athénas and Merlo were cousins from Réunion, and wrote articles about Anglada as well as dedicating a chapter in one of their books to him.