Antoni Clavé was born in Barcelona in 1913. After attending evening classes at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios Artisticos (school of arts and artistic crafts) and the Escuela de Bellas Artes (school of fine arts) in Barcelona alongside a student job in a textile workshop, Clavé’s appetite for art only grew. He was hired as construction painter and familiarised himself with the use of paintbrushes and other tools, but quickly forfeited his position for an opening at the Cinematografica Nacional Española, where he was hired to create movie posters. Clavé lived off cultural, advertising and decorative work until the advent of the Spanish Civil War. Recruited in 1937, he secured a position as a propaganda poster designer. Clavé, like many others, fled to France when his native city fell to the Francoist armies. A paperless refugee in Perpignan, he still managed to create and show work.
A victim of the 20th century, Clavé was in Paris when the Germans invaded in 1940. After a failed attempt to flee to Venezuela, he remained in the French capital where he sets up his first workshop. Once liberated, Paris proved plentiful in terms of opportunities: exhibitions, artist circles, collaborations with prestigious institutions for costumes and set design.
The 1950s marked the beginning of Clavé’s international acclaim through a series of foundational exhibitions; at the Witcomb Gallery in Buenos Aires, at the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome and at the Galerie Drouant-David in Paris in 1953; and at the Galleria del Sole in Milan in 1954. That same year, he abandoned theatre design to dedicate himself to painting full-time. He was recompensed for his dedication in 1958 in the form of an exhibition at the Galerie Creuzevault in Paris. From that point onwards, prices and solo shows increased. In 1965, he established his base in the south of France, but spent little time there as his art travelled the world. All this attention culminated in a massive retrospective held at the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 1978.
Having been adopted by the world, Clavé turned his attention back to his home city in the 1980s. Numerous shows and travelling exhibitions spread his talents in Spain, while his reputation continued to grow worldwide in parallel. That the city of Barcelona commissioned a monumental sculpture from Clavé in memory of the 1888 Universal Exhibition speaks to his local success. His success remained undiminished until his death in 2005, and even beyond.
The Contemporary Art Centre of the Fernet-Branca Foundation of Saint-Louis and the Galerie Beyeler in Basel were the first to dedicate comprehensive retrospectives to the artist, respectively in 2006 and 2008. The city of Barcelona organised festivities to celebrate the centennial of the artist’s birth (2013). A critical catalogue of Clavé’s corpus was published in 2017.
