The golden Salamanca of Friar Luis de León was the setting of a childhood that simultaneously breathed the sober petrous monumentality of the city and the austere horizontal poetry of the surrounding fields, reconnecting architecture and landscape in the retina of a child whose first teacher was a Protestant pastor known to have been a friend of Unamuno and executed at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The adolescent lived the hard times of the postwar nurturing a precociously artistic sensitivity that his 1947 move to Madrid for university studies exposed to the fertile influence of the big city’s cultural climate. There, under the generous guidance of a friend of his father, the architect José Luis Fernández del Amo, the young student struggled with the mathematical demands of his study program, familiarized himself with the world of exhibitions and museums, and struck friendships with Antonio Saura and other artists, with them promoting El Paso, an experimental group that opened Spain to winds from abroad...
