In this brief overview of the life of Spanish painter José Gutiérrez Solana, Colombian artist Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo criticizes the overly academic Spanish art scene of the first decade of the 20th century and describes its social context. Solana’s teachers at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid formed part of the milieu against which Gómez Jaramillo fought. Gómez Jaramillo describes Solana’s work as “powerful and deep” and compares it to the work of “Valdés Leal, Herrera, Ribera, Zurbarán, and mostly Goya,” which stands in opposition to what the author calls the “Spain of the tambourine” in reference to the facile and picturesque nationalism of some painters. He argues that, unlike other contemporary painters from the region, Solana’s sensibility is “deep, tragic, frank, and realist.” In closing, Gómez Jaramillo remarks on some passages from José Gutiérrez Solana (Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidón, 1944), the biography of Solana by Spanish intellectual and writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

This essay by Colombian artist Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo (1910–70) may have been written in response to the publication of the first edition of José Gutiérrez Solana (Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidón, 1944) by Spanish ultraist Ramón Gómez de la Serna. It is an adaptation of an earlier text by Gómez Jaramillo on the same artist (see Gómez Jaramillo, Ignacio: “El pintor español José Gutiérrez Solana”, Revista de las Indias, Bogotá, Vol. 5, No. 16, April, 1940, pp. 442–48). 

On the basis of this brief biography of José Gutiérrez Solana (1886–1945), it is possible to infer Gómez Jaramillo’s position on Colombian art of the time. He criticizes the “españolería” style or the “Spain of the tambourine” popular in Colombia thanks to artists such as Ricardo Gómez Campuzano (1891?1981) and Miguel Díaz Vargas (1886–1956). He also criticizes academic painting rooted in the Spanish tradition; significantly, Díaz Vargas, an artist who had studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, had won first prize at the V Salón Nacional de Artistas in 1944 for his Estudio en gris (1944), a highly academic nude.

Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo was one of the most important Colombian artists of the first half of the 20th century. His style was influenced by Paul Cézanne (1839?1906) and his conceptual approach by Mexican muralism. Indeed, he painted murals in a number of public buildings in Colombia, among them the Capitolio Nacional (seat of the Colombian Congress) where, in 1938, he made the frescos La liberación de los esclavos and Los comuneros. Gómez Jaramillo studied engineering at the Escuela de Minas in Medellín and then in Barcelona. In 1930, he produced his series of landscapes of Toledo. In 1931, the first solo exhibition of his work was held in Madrid.   

Gómez Jaramillo lived in Mexico in 1936 and 1937, where he studied mural painting thanks to a grant from the Colombian Ministerio de Educación. From 1938 to 1940, he taught fresco painting, composition, and drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad Nacional of Colombia (Bogotá) and, from 1940 to 1944, he was the director of that institution. In 1940, he was awarded first prize at the I Salón Nacional de Artistas for his oil painting Madre del pintor. He took part in a number of editions of the salon and, in 1961, he was awarded first prize in the drawing category.