Eugenio Granell

Eugenio Fernández Granell (A Coruña, 1912 - Madrid, 2001) was a Spanish Surrealist painter who also worked as a writer and poet. His career took him through Spain, France, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and the United States. He matters chiefly for his link to Surrealism and for a body of painting that moved from Cubist-inspired figures to a metamorphic language and later to abstraction.

Raised largely in Santiago de Compostela, he moved to Madrid in 1928 to study the violin. There he attended political and literary gatherings and joined the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, in 1935. After the Spanish Civil War he fled to France and then to South America. In Santo Domingo he met André Breton, with whom he kept a lasting friendship, and in Puerto Rico he formed a bond with Juan Ramón Jiménez. In 1958 he met Marcel Duchamp, who praised his work and strengthened his commitment to Surrealism.

In his Dominican period his paintings blended influences from Picasso, Wilfredo Lam and Miró. In Guatemala he produced Cubist-inspired portraits of Indigenous heads, and in Puerto Rico he reached full maturity with metamorphosed organic forms. Around 1957, once settled in New York, he abandoned figuration for a surface built from small overlapping brushstrokes like scales, returning to figurative painting in 1972. He moved back to Spain in 1985, and in his final years he simplified both composition and colour.

His legacy is kept alive by the Fundación Eugenio Granell, founded in 1995 in Santiago de Compostela, which named him an adopted son of the city in 1997.