This drawing is a typical work by Andalusian artist Ismael de La Serna in the 1930s, when he reached full maturity in his art after spending ten years in Paris. His style at that time was characterized by a subdued Cubism, with which he brilliantly revisited one of the great themes of Spanish Golden Age painting: the "bodegón," a composition of cooking objects, in between a still life and an interior scene.

1. Ismael de La Serna, "a real painter! As great as Juan Gris!"

Ismael González de la Serna was born in 1898 in Guadix, a town located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in the province of Granada in Andalusia. He began painting and drawing at the age of nine and became friends with Federico Garcia Lorca, who would go on to become a famous poet and playwright. In fact, it was La Serna who illustrated the cover of his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes, in 1918.

La Serna continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Granada, where he learned the traditional rules of composition, form, and color. A turning point in his life came in 1917 when he visited an exhibition of French Impressionists in Madrid while continuing his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, also in Madrid. According to his own account, he was then determined to become a "free" painter, devoted to new forms.

La Serna moved to Paris in 1921. At first, he led a bohemian and penniless life in Montparnasse, where he met other Spanish artists, also attracted by a less rigid and less academic approach than that of the Spanish galleries and art critics of the time. He was introduced to Picasso by the writer, critic, and art collector known as Tériade. According to Tériade, Picasso, upon seeing La Serna's work, exclaimed, "Finally, a real painter! As great as Juan Gris!"

In 1927, Tériade devoted an article to him in an issue of the magazine Cahiers d'Art, and the Galerie Paul Guillaume organized an exhibition of fifty works by La Serna, which was very well received. A solo exhibition at the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin was equally successful, with all the works finding buyers.

Ismael de La Serna was warmly welcomed throughout Europe. In 1928, he signed contracts to exhibit his works at the Zak Gallery in Paris in 1930 and at the Le Centaure Gallery in Brussels. The art critic and founder of Cahiers d'Art, Christian Zervos, celebrated La Serna's incredible talent as a draftsman in his magazine. In 1932, he returned triumphantly to Spain, where he toured a series of successful exhibitions. In 1936, he took part in an exhibition at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, and in 1937, he exhibited at the International Exhibition in Paris in the Spanish pavilion, alongside Picasso, who was presenting Guernica for the first time.

La Serna adopted a post-Cubist style, although during World War II his paintings were more influenced by Expressionism and Abstraction. During the 1950s and 1960s, his painting became more abstract, evolving towards compositions of pure colors and shapes. Ismael de La Serna died in Paris in 1968. In 1974, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris organized a monographic retrospective in his honor, featuring nearly a hundred paintings spanning his entire career.

His work is represented in many museums, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Beaubourg, the Reina Sofia Center in Madrid, the National Gallery in Madrid, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mexico City.

2. A Cubist bodegón

In this drawing, La Serna follows the Spanish tradition dating back to the Golden Age of bodegón representation[1] , a very specific genre of still life that features only elements related to food (kitchen utensils, crockery, game, vegetables, etc.) in a kitchen interior, where figures also often included.

While La Serna follows this tradition by depicting two large jars and a glass on a table covered with a tablecloth in a kitchen with a large fireplace visible in the background, he renews the approach by introducing a plate containing two brioches and a very Parisian croissant, but above all by his simplistic treatment of volumes and brightness, strongly inspired by Cubism.

The highly structured still life consisting of the two jars, the glass, and the plate is disrupted by the insertion in the foreground of a chair placed at a three-quarter angle, as if it had just been abandoned by an invisible presence, but also by the introduction, to the left of the two jars, of resolutely geometric elements whose figurative meaning escapes us.

3. Framing

We have chosen to frame this drawing in a simple wooden frame, including a gray-wash marie-louise that adds depth to the artwork.

[1] Outside of this historical context, this word is also used in Spanish in a more generic way to refer to still lifes.