Santiago Montes Luengas (Villa de Laredo, Cantabria, July 25, 1911 - 1954), was a Spanish painter.
Montes the second of seven brothers of a family of fishermen, whose brother Angel died during the Civil War.
Biography
Of early vocation, the young Montes comes in contact with the painter Flavio San Roman who was during a whole summer painting corners of Villa de Laredo. The young Montes captivated by the mastery of the painter, spends a lot of time first watching him and then helping him in the washing of the brushes and in the mixture of colors. San Roman, once appreciated the drawings that the young Montes taught him, made efforts to get a scholarship to study at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he coincided with the sculptor Jesús Otero de Santillana del Mar with which he developed a deep Friendship1 and where I also frequent the workshop of Gerardo de Alvear. Montes spent two years in Madrid studying painting, and where he received from his colleagues the nickname of 'wizard of the wrinkle'.
With the arrival of the Civil War, Montes, who fought for the side of the Republican Government, and just before the 1936 takeover of Santander by the insurgents, tried unsuccessfully to flee to France by boat. Failed every attempt of voluntary exile decides to hide, according to a common practice, in his own house, in a hiding place camouflaged in the attic, that only he and his wife knew, and that they kept hidden their four children to avoid that they could unintentionally betray him. In this way he lived eight years of his life until 1945, without his children knowing that he was so close and of which he could visually enjoy in few circumstances through a hole in the ceiling.2 During the forced confinement Montes paints and draws Obsessively.
At the end of World War II in 1945 coinciding with an amnesty of the pro-Franco regime, Montes decided to leave his hiding place and surrender to the authority that keeps him in prison for almost a year pending the application of the amnesty. During his stay in the jail for political prisoners of Yeserías in Madrid, as in Santander, portraits of fellow captives include Cipriano Rivas Cherif4 brother-in-law Manuel Azaña, President of the Republic. In 1946, with enough evidence to excuse him of serious crimes, he regains his freedom and begins a new professional and creative stage that leads him to become an official copyist of the Prado Museum making copies of Mantegna, Van Der Weyden, or Murillo so good that Even the experts find it difficult to differentiate them from the original ones. Parallel to the numerous copies, almost all of the foreign tourists who visit the museum, Montes performs his own personal pictorial work in an artistic career that was abruptly interrupted in 1954 by his untimely death at the age of forty-three.
Work
The artistic production of Montes has included on the one hand the copy of great pictorial works such as those mentioned in the Prado or those that he could know thanks to the first color images that began to circulate in art publications, and on the other the own work where They find landscapes, still lifes, and numerous portraits.
Santiago Montes was one of the artistic revelations of Cantabria unknown for a long time who over the years has gradually regained the deserved place until, in 2008, the local corporation of his native town has granted to dedicate a street in his name. 3
References
Http://es.paperblog.com/santiago-montes-1455247/
Http://www.marisol.co.uk/montes/montes.htm
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Barcelona
Http://www.museosantandermas.es/es/coleccion/depositos/artista-dep.html?id=344&dep=S
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