Almeria,
José Manaut Viglietti was born in the Valencian town of Lliria in the key year of 1898 and his belonging to a family with cultural concerns allowed him to train at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts and, years later, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.
In the 1920s he would be a pensioner at the National Residence of Landscape Painters, which was located in the Monastery of Paular de Rascafría, and then he obtained a scholarship that allowed him to travel to France, Belgium and Holland and expand his knowledge of Impressionism and the rest of the avant-garde (also about Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals); He lived, in fact, until 1927 in France and was able to star in several exhibitions in Paris salons.
Upon his return to Spain, he combined his work as an artist with teaching drawing, theorizing art history, and political activities, until his death in 1971.
Closely related to Joaquín Sorolla, who had a decisive influence on his working methods, and a disciple of Cecilio Pla, also Valencian and author of a fundamentally diverse work, also indebted to Mediterranean light, Manaut is the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. MUREC of Almería.
Under the curation of Javier Pérez Rojas and David Gutiérrez Pulido, this anthology invites us to review the keys to his language, his own but determined by his vast knowledge of European painting: rigorous in drawing, sensitive and luminous, attentive to the human figure and also to the Mediterranean landscape.
The two fundamental poles of influence for the Valencian, apart from his international journey, were the Prado Museum and his admired Sorolla. In the art gallery, since his arrival in Madrid in 1919, he made numerous copies of the masters (he also studied El Greco in Toledo). As for Sorolla, he was his teacher in San Fernando and we know that, in addition, he received him in his studio and gave him advice that would be very useful, among them, precisely, giving vital importance to drawing.
Open to any opportunity to expand knowledge, Manaut also visited Mariano Benlliure and frequently visited the National Library to analyze illustrative works of the Quixote and works by Muñoz Degrain, raising comparisons between his production and that of El Greco.
In Paris he did not stop drawing Parisian types, especially women, even on the pages of his notebooks, on loose sheets or small pieces of paper: he quickly captured their impressions and their vision of public spaces, in this case very French, such as gardens, cafes or theaters. Back in our country, one of the towns that interested him the most was Ronda; He gave an account of his travels in diaries, where he also wrote interesting descriptions of what he painted.
The exhibition can be visited until February 1.
“José Manaut. From impressionism to expressionism”
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY SPANISH REALISM. MUREC
Paseo de San Luis, s/n
Almeria
From October 31, 2025 to February 1, 2026
