We’ve been using Google Inside Search to help us identify some prints in the collection. All you have to do is upload a photo and magically it can find it in seconds! Whilst looking through some folders of posters and facsimiles we came across this lithograph. We uploaded it onto Google and were able to identify the artist as Antoni Clavé, a contemporary of Picasso and one of Spain’s best loved artists.

Clavé was born in Barcelona in 1913 and was trained at the School of Fine Arts from the age of thirteen, working as a house painter to support himself. He was a painter, sculptor and printmaker but is best known for working with collage.

He is also well-known for his theatrical costume and set designs which have appeared on stages across the world (famously in Roland Petit’s ballet, Carmen). He been has also nominated for two Academy Awards for his work on the film Hans Christian Anderson (1952)

During the Spanish Civil War, Clavé served as a Draughtsman in the Republican Army. When the Nationalists took power in 1939, he fled to France to escape persecution and began working as a book illustrator. It was in Paris that he met Picasso who he became heavily influenced by and his style became gradually more abstract. His series Hommage à Picasso in the 1980s is testament to this.

This lithograph entitled, Femme Peintre au Coq (1950), depicts a woman sitting and painting. It is widely believed to be of Clavé’s mother, Maria Sanmarti, a well-known painter and lithographer. She was partially paralyzed and begun painting to encourage her son to pursue a career in art.

Colette Bush, MGS Collections Intern