End of an Exile

In 1937, while the Civil War in Spain ground grimly on, the great names of Spanish art assembled a show at the International Exposition in Paris to demonstrate their solidarity with the beleaguered republic. Picasso was represented by Guernica, his agonized portrayal of a small town obliterated by German dive bombers. From Miro came The Reaper, a ferocious antiwar mural that has since been lost. Towering above the other works in the Spanish pavilion was a graceful, 41-ft.-high stalk of flowing concrete, by a lanky Castilian sculptor who had been commissioned by the Loyalist government in Madrid to cast his own version of the struggle. He called it: The Spanish People Have a Path Which Leads to a Star.

The sculptor's name was Alberto Sanchez. Although little known to the gallery-going public, he was something of a legend to his fellow artists. "We all called him Alberto," Picasso said later. "And almost no one remembered his last name. Alberto by itself was enough, because there was only one Alberto." Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, recalls visiting Picasso's studio one day to find the two Spaniards deep in conversation. Suddenly Picasso whirled on his mild-mannered friend. "What's your opinion, Alberto? Who's the greatest sculptor of our time?" Sanchez thought for a moment, then ventured, "Brancusi?" "No," answered Picasso. "You are, Alberto, you."

Missing Link. Sanchez was the particular pride of the Loyalists. The year after the Paris Exposition, the hard-pressed Madrid government allotted some of their meager funds to send him to Moscow to teach drawing to evacuated Spanish children. Although Sanchez was not a Communist, he remained there until his death in 1962, an event that passed unmentioned in the controlled Spanish press. But Franco's Spain has mellowed since then, and this summer the exile was welcomed home posthumously with a large exhibition of his sculpture, drawings and stage designs at Madrid's Museum of Contemporary Art. Critics hailed the show as a revelation. "The missing link in contemporary Spanish art," wrote one. "A fiesta mayor," declared another. "Like El Cid, the sculptor has returned to the land where he was born and lived his Spanish years to win new battles after death."

Born in Toledo in 1895, the son of a baker, Sanchez attended primary school for only four months; at the age of seven worked as a swineherd to support his family. Later, as a blacksmith's apprentice, working the great bellows and watching metal being hammered into new shapes, he began to dream of creating forms of his own. After his eyesight had been injured by stray sparks from the forge, he joined his family in Madrid and eventually became a baker. Some of the patterns characteristic of Spanish breads can be observed in his sculpture. "All his life he was kneading and sculpting." says Alberto's nephew Jorge, who grew up in his uncle's apartment in Moscow. "I think there came a time when the two fused in his consciousness, and the leaven he shaped and carved by day passed forever into the texture and design of his nature forms."

Phantom Figures. Introduced to the Madrid art world by Uruguayan Painter Rafael Barradas, Sanchez became the co-founder with Painter Benjamin Palencia of the Vallecas school, which sought to escape from academicism and create a new kind of national art based on themes and images from Spanish tradition and folklore. Even while he lived as an exile in Russia, his sculpture, primarily in wood and sheet iron, remained distinctly Iberian in spirit. "He saw art in everything," his widow Clara recently recalled. "And once he had seen it, everything became a work of art. It all served his purpose--clay, stones he stumbled across on a path, old wood, a piece of iron."

In his drawings, the desolate Castilian plains of his childhood serve as a stark backdrop for phantom figures hovering on the landscape. His sculpture frequently shows a more whimsical turn, with animals and even inanimate objects eloquently taking on human personalities, as in "Bull" or "The Root Hunter." Stylistically, Sanchez is obviously of the generation of Dali, Miro and Picasso--but with a small difference. Far more than his contemporaries, he kept a firm foot, however far away he was, on the good Spanish earth.

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