Federico Beltrán Masses (8 September 1885 – 4 October 1949) was a Spanish painter known for his rich use of colour, psychological portraiture, and evocative images of women.
Born in Cuba to Spanish parents, he spent his youth in Barcelona before studying painting in Madrid under Joaquín Sorolla. Beltrán Masses achieved significant success in Paris during the early twentieth century, exhibiting internationally and receiving critical acclaim. His work is characterized by Symbolist influences, dramatic nocturnal settings, and a distinctive colour palette known as "Beltrán blue." Despite a period of obscurity after his death, his reputation has been revived in recent decades through exhibitions and scholarly interest.
Early life and education Federico Beltrán Masses was born on 8 September 1885 in Cuba, the only child of Luis Beltrán Fernández Estepona, a former Spanish army officer stationed there, and Doña Mercedes Masses Olives, the daughter of a doctor from Lleida, Catalonia. His mother's family had lived in Cuba for nearly two centuries. When Beltrán Masses was seven years old, his family returned to Spain and settled in Barcelona. He began his artistic training at the Escola de la Llotja and later moved to Madrid, where he continued his studies under the painter Joaquín Sorolla.
Career
Early success in Spain and Paris
In 1904, when he was 19 years old, to convince his father that he was a true painter, he copied Leo Van Aken's painting 'Human Misery' from 1890.
His 1915 portrait of a Spanish countess, seated nude save for a white mantilla between two fully clothed companions (La Maja Marquesa), was rejected by the National Exhibition jury. According to contemporary critic José Francés, the jury claimed the painting might reference a specific marchioness known for scandalous behavior. The jury requested that Beltrán change the title from La Maja Marquesa to Las majas, but Beltrán Masses refused. This incident prompted Beltrán Masses to move to Paris, where he spent most of the next thirty years.
Before departing, Beltrán Masses held a solo exhibition at The Palace Hotel Madrid in March 1916. King Alfonso XIII visited the exhibition, which featured nearly 80 canvases, including major works such as Demeter, Granada, Dionysus, Invocación a Lakmé, La barca deleitosa, La súplica, Bilitis, Siemprevivas, Intimidad, and Las hermanas. Further successes followed at the XII Venice Biennale of 1920 and in subsequent exhibitions in Paris, New York, Palm Beach, and London, where his work received enthusiastic reviews.
In 1926, Martha Graham titled a dance in her first New York performance "Portrait – Beltrán Masses." In 1929, the temporary removal of two particularly explicit paintings from a London exhibition provoked controversy but drew over 17,000 visitors within three weeks.
Alfonso XIII's support and a personal introduction by the Spanish Dowager Queen, Maria Christina of Austria, to the Spanish Ambassador, gave Beltrán Masses immediate access to Parisian society. He established his studio in the villa Gilbert on rue de La Tour in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
His work as a portraitist became an important source of revenue; European royalty, members of the Spanish, French, Italian, and British aristocracy, the wives and lovers of newly rich entrepreneurs, and leading actors and dancers all vied for his attention.
Critical acclaim and exhibitions Venice, where Beltrán Masses had first met with international fame, became for him the city of his dreams. The Venice exhibition included several of his best-known works, notably his nude Salomé, which was later to cause a scandal in London. Beltrán Masses' huge success at the 1920 Venice Biennale was consecrated by the inclusion of his Portrait of the Painter in the gallery of famous painters at the Uffizi, leading to a major solo exhibition at the Cercle Interalliée in Paris. Other exhibitions in the French capital were held in succeeding years at the Georges Petit, Bernheim, Charpentier and Jacques Seligmann galleries, and at the Galerie Borghese on the Champs-Élysées.
Beltrán Masses benefited from the enthusiastic support of the critics Arsène Alexandre (1859–1937), an early admirer of Rodin and Seurat (Alexandre coined the term "pointillism"), and Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1945), who first used the word "Fauvism" and invented the adjective "Cubism". The poet, novelist, and critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945), an advocate for the Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also praised Beltrán Masses. In a letter reproduced by Francés, Mauclair described Beltrán as one of the few contemporary painters who understood the moral responsibilities of art and praised him for creating intelligent work in contrast to what he saw as twenty years of declining painting. Mauclair declared him already a master and stated that no Spanish painter of comparable stature had emerged since Zuloaga.
Vauxcelles and Mauclair wrote lengthy introductions to a 1921 illustrated monograph on the artist, in which five paintings included in this exhibition were reproduced. Alexandre later wrote the introduction to Beltrán Masses's illustrations for a 1929 edition of Il Trionfo della Morte (1894) by the renowned Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, exhibited at the Galerie Javal and Bourdeaux.
Reception in the United States Reports of his fame reached the United States by 1921; American Art News mentioned the success of Beltrán Masses' first Paris exhibition. The early twentieth century had seen an explosion of interest in Spanish art, exemplified by John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo and Isabella Stewart Gardner's Spanish Cloister gallery (now part of her eponymous museum) to house it.
Beltrán Masses was later elected a member of the Hispanic Society of America. In 1924, Beltrán Masses was invited to exhibit at the Wildenstein galleries in New York; more commercially successful exhibitions followed in Palm Beach and Los Angeles, both in 1925.
Los Angeles was yet to establish a major art museum, and such was the excitement generated by the paintings of Beltrán Masses that the exhibition opened with a lengthy musical programme of Spanish and Mexican music and a reception for hundreds of black-tie attired guests.
The favourable reviews Beltrán Masses received in America and the praise for the "psychological" insights he captured brought him a succession of commissions from American East and West Coast society.
Hollywood connections
Beltrán Masses' success in Hollywood and the acquaintances he made through friendship with the actress Marion Davies and her lover William Randolph Hearst (who purchased four paintings by the artist and whose portrait he painted) helped his career greatly. An astute self-promoter, Beltrán Masses made much of his connection to Hearst, with whom he travelled in Europe.
Surviving photographic archives show Beltrán Masses with Charlie Chaplin, the Hearst newspaper columnist Louella Parsons, the actress Merle Oberon, screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Senior and his son Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Sylvia Ashley, Pola Negri, and Gloria Swanson, whom he also painted, among other Hollywood personalities.
Beltrán Masses painted two large-scale portraits of Rudolph Valentino, each . Caballero Jerezano shows him in gaucho dress against a nocturnal landscape; Dawn Le Faucon Noir shows him as a medieval crusader, a woman kneeling beside him.
Beltrán Masses' later connections with French cinema were cemented by the inclusion of twelve paintings and three drawings in the 1934 film, Le Rosaire, staged by Gaston Ravel and Tony Lekain.
Years after Beltrán Masses's brief time in Hollywood, friends such as Davies, Hearst, Fairbanks, and Joan Crawford still visited him in Paris during the 1930s.
Later exhibitions and critical response The immediate success of Beltrán Masses' 1929 exhibition in London at the New Burlington Galleries owed much to the art historian and critic for The Observer and Daily Mail, Paul George Konody (1872–1933), who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue and reviewed it for the Daily Mail in a one-page article.
This exhibition – from which two paintings, the Salomé and The Nights of Eve, were initially removed – was a triumph for the artist: eighteen paintings in the show remained in England after the exhibition.
Despite his evident admiration for the artist, Konody avoided being slavish in his praise. While he complimented the artist on his romantic sensibility and brilliant use of colour, he was critical of the occasional contradictions in his drawing.
Beltrán Masses had a second large-scale exhibition in London at the galleries of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1934, but his final public exhibition in London, also at the New Burlington Galleries, in 1938 did not achieve the same success.
Beltrán Masses was a member of the jury for Miss France 1938.
Impact of the Spanish Civil War and World War II
The horrors of the Spanish Civil War caused the artist great distress. Beltrán Masses was instinctively unsympathetic to the Republic, believing it had destroyed much that he treasured; the support of the exiled King Alfonso XIII had also been an important factor in his early success.
A practising Catholic and a knight of both the Order of Malta and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, Beltrán Masses instinctively supported the Nationalists, but he was also deeply affected by the tragic consequences of the conflict, having friends on both sides.
He remained in Paris after the outbreak of the Second World War. As a citizen of a neutral power, he was able to live relatively undisturbed by the German occupation. The art market suffered, however, and he was forced to move to a smaller home and give painting lessons in his studio to make ends meet.
When ill health and failing eyesight, which had begun deteriorating in the mid-1930s, required urgent attention, Beltrán Masses travelled to Madrid, but returned to Paris the following year, hoping to resume his career. This proved impossible. Liver disease now compounded his earlier heart problems, and on 4 October 1949, Beltrán Masses died, aged sixty-four.
Recognition and legacy
Recognition during his lifetime During his life, Beltrán Masses was showered with public honours and was a member of the Academies of San Fernando in Madrid, San Jorge in Barcelona, and San Luís in Zaragoza, as well as those of Lisbon, Córdoba, and Málaga. He was also a member of the French Institut and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Posthumous exhibitions and public collections In 1950, the Lyceum, Havana, Cuba, staged a small posthumous exhibition of his portraits — his first monographic exhibition in the country of his birth.
Two important paintings in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, and others in the collection of the Reina Sofía, the Civic Museum in Ciudad Real, and the Casa Lis in Salamanca, have offered few opportunities to see his paintings on public exhibition. When the Cuban Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana reopened in 2000, two large-scale works by Beltrán Masses were revealed to a public that had no previous acquaintance with the Cuban-born artist.
The Stair Sainty Gallery staged an exhibition of Beltrán Masses' paintings, which ran until 24 March 2016.
Revival and renewed interest