Untitled (The children's room), 1932-1933

Rosario de Velasco certainly lacks no ingredient to qualify as a ‘one-painting artist,’ that sort of single hit in the career of an artist who, supposedly, produces no further special work, whatever the reason: shortage of talent, marriage, lack of opportunities, conscious decision, motherhood… or any of the factors laid down by Germaine Greer in her well-known book The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. Before the war, she was a girl one might describe as cut out for the norms of the day but quite precocious. Then she went by the more predictable pattern: she married, fitting into a certain Catalan bourgeoisie loyal to Franco, and kept up good relations with the official authorities of the moment, at least in appearance. Even her rapport with Eugeni d’Ors – one of the most powerful and most brilliant critics in the art scene of the 1940s and 1950s with his Academia Breve de Crítica de Arte and his Exposiciones Antológicas, which amounted to ‘salons’ – is often mentioned in terms of her husband’s friendship with him; an efficient tactic to erase all chances at success, or even future, for any artist...[+]