1925

He painted his first known and dated Cubist works this year. They show the influence, as the author pointed out, of Juan Gris and Georges Braque, but also of André Lhote and Gino Severini, among others. These early Cubist paintings are part of his process to learn a style and a technique, and they are experiments that would open new ways.

It is important to point out that Moreno Villa began to move within the current circles of Spanish painting and was included in the First Exhibition of Iberian Artists that took place in Madrid’s Retiro palaces in May. This exhibition, a key point in the history of modern Spanish art, was his public introduction as a professional artist. He exhibited three paintings and several drawings. He began his series of dibujos alámbricos (wire drawings) in April. We can already see in these drawings his inclination for the line, and the free creative spirit in which the intellectual game is transformed into lyrical arabesques.

He went to Paris in September and visited the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, where he saw for the first time the works of painters he had followed in the vanguard newspapers and periodicals. He got to meet his admired Juan Gris and visited him at his home, in a small village outside Paris. Moreno Villa wrote about this meeting:

“ He dresses like a blue collar worker and he looks like one. He speaks of his paintings and handles them as if they were parts of an engine. He says he does not consider painting as priesthood. He is interested in a painting while he is creating it, then nothing.”

He also met Fernando García Mercadal in Paris, and they talked about the young architect’s project on the formal characteristics of Spanish architecture. The meeting awoke Moreno Villa’s interest in that subject and, as a result, he wrote his beautiful essay “Fisonomía del caserío malagueño,” published by the Archivo Español de Arte y Arqueología that year. Among his contributions to the press, we should mention Una lección de museo. Tras la morfología de Rubens,” published in Revista de Occidente, and the series “Art Themes,” (El Sol) this time focused on modern art and, in particular African art and French painters such as Rousseau, Cézanne, and Seurat. The photographs of the so- called Order of Toledo, that included Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, José María Hinojosa, José Bello, and Moreno Villa, were taken at the Venta del Aire in Toledo also this year.