From today, the Diocesa Museum is dedicating, until end of July, an anthological exhibition to Federico Beltran Masses (1885-1949), who reached great notoriety painting portraits of nobles and actors in the period between wars. His sensual paintings were disputed in the 20's by the European nobility and Hollywood in black/white, amongst them his friend Rodolfo Valentino, Marion Davies, Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin.
He was the most known and solicited artist in Europe and in America, and the best paid during that era. His paintings cost more that those of Picasso but with time he fell into oblivion. This exhibition wants to recuperate an exceptional artist, says Jordi Figuerola, historian and commissary of this retrospective under the title 'Un pintor a la cort de Hollywood'.
A great number of his paintings exude feminine eroticism, for which in 1915, his portraits of women baring their breasts stirred avid controversy and polemics in Spain. 3 years later, he triumphed in Paris with his painting 'Maja Maldita (as my Blog pic today), a personal view of a woman whom he painted with a back-comb whose long mantilla covers her nude body, but can be seen through the almost transparency of the lace
The legacy of this painter is an enigma of beauty.
This painting in oil is titled: Las Ibericas
