Why this Site?

My father's good friend, Luis Araquistain, once suggested that what he, my father, needed to make his name known was a good book of reproductions. Araquistain, who could have done it, died before such a book could be made. In that spirit, I have created this webpage, a web museum for my father's work.

For decades now I have had an enormous quantity of his paintings, drawings, water colors, pastels and engravings in storage here at home, nearly all of it unseen, unknown, and unremarked upon. But the miracle of modern electronics, so foreign to my father's world, has made it possible for me to make his work easily available to the entire world.

Once he was an acclaimed artist, championed by many renowned authors and fellow artists. Today it may be hard to believe that Ernest Hemingway once remarked, as his brother, Leicester, told me, that Luis Quintanilla "can paint the ass off of anybody." Though my father's work "may have the virtue of not being a photogenic art," as another friend, Angel Sanchez Rivero, put it, with this web museum I hope to at least acquaint you to the enormous variety, imaginative force, good humor, humanity, and beauty of his work. My father never signed that most Modernist of contracts declaring aesthetics null and void. Instead he worked intensely, every day, developing his own artistic personality and vision: "working with the mad fury of all true artists, driven as they ever were by some primal urge," as his friend Herbert Matthews, of The New York Times, wrote in the catalog for his Wildenstein show.

How to Navigate this Site

I have created two basic approaches for exploring this site. One chronological, the other topical.

The Main Menu, the topical approach, will allow you to visit his work by medium and genre.

The chronological approach will permit you to explore his work as it developed and changed over the years.

Each web page will offer at least three links which will allow you to proceed or return: there will be a Main Menu link, a Chronology link, and a link to the menu you may have just employed.

This "return" menu can be found at the bottom of each page. It will look much like this:

Lithograph: 20 1/2 x 23 3/4"

How to Reach Me

I would be interested in hearing from you.

pquint2@cox.net

Comments

Other Web Sites

These are links for other sites on the Web:

American Printmakers On-line Catalogue Raisonne Project: The Prints of Luis Quintanilla

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Graphic Witness

Personajes Cantabras

Elliot Paul: a Chronology

(Selected Bibliography)