“Always in me the idea really is that when I look at paintings I disregard whether they belong to this movement or the other movement, any movement. I try to relate what I see to what to me is fundamental, which is to have something that is timeless and is related to this big thing that exists in the world which is the great, great tradition; and to be able to bring it to today somehow.”- Esteban Vicente, as quoted by biographer Elizabeth Frank
Esteban Vicente helped organize and participated in the famed 9th Street show, an historic invitational held in Greenwich Village in 1951 that solidified Abstract Expressionism in the U.S. art canon. He was the artist in residence at Princeton University, and the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. Over the course of his career, Vicente served on the faculties of many leading universities, including: the University of California, Berkeley, in 1954 and 1958; New York University, 1959–1969; Yale University, 1960–1961; the University of California, Los Angeles, 1962; and Princeton University, 1965–1966 and again 1969–1972. The prize-winning American poet John Ashbery once praised Vicente as being “admired as one of the best teachers of painting in America.” He taught master classes at New York Studio School and Parsons School of Design. In 1991, Vicente received the gold medal in Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain at the Prado Museum. In 2011, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University organized a career retrospective featuring collages, paintings and small-scale assemblages showcasing his talent as both a painter and a sculptor. His work is in major public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid, to name a few. He died in 2001, leaving us his visual legacy.
