BIOGRAPHY

Francisco Sainz was born in Santander, Spain in 1923, the son of a railway worker and a teacher. Dreaming of a bullfighting career, he left home at the age of 14 to live with cousins in Madrid. Still in his mid-teens, he was swept up in an event that would forever mark his life and work – the Spanish Civil War. He took part in activities directed against Franco’s insurgent fascist forces, and was briefly arrested as a result. For the next few years, he remained active in underground opposition to Franco, and lived under an assumed name. While taking art courses in Barcelona in 1944 under the famed painter, Francisco Sainz de la Maza, he did not feel safe telling the master that they shared the same name.

In 1944, Sainz left Spain for Portugal, where the Mexican Embassy granted him political asylum in Mexico. En route by ship to Mexico in 1945, he was convinced by a fellow Spaniard on board to join the substantial Spanish community in New York, and he jumped ship. Although he would always miss Spain (as a political dissident, he did not feel safe to pay a return visit until the late 1960’s during Franco’s last years), he came to love New York. He dove, with characteristic enthusiasm, into the Greenwich Village and East Hampton artististic communities. Sainz was part of an East Hampton community that at the time included Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He was also a friend of Jack Kerouac, who lived nearby in the East Village. Sainz’s second marriage, in 1969, took place in the village’s Washington Square Park. The marriage was covered by Life Magazine as a major artistic happening and a prime illustration of the new era of creative outdoor ceremonies

Sainz does not belong to any one school of art. His extremely varied body of work reflects experimentation in a number of different genres. Besides the series of abstract works featured in this show, he created a vast collection of representational paintings, including landscapes and portraits of friends, historical figures, and fellow artists. The portraits have a quality of stopped time, as if the subjects are aware of something taking place which is larger than the moment. Sainz brings a novel perspective to the portrait that is sometimes humorous, sometimes angrily political. Among the more striking portrayals are of himself as Saint Francis; Willem de Kooning as a Dutch Admiral; Franco as a hunter holding a killed rabbit, whose still dripping blood forms the map of Spain.