Manuel López-Villaseñor was born in Ciudad Real in 1924. Childhood was a challenging time for the artist-to-be, as he suffered from paralysis leaving him bed ridden. Incapable of partaking in or even enjoying the games of the time and his peers, he spent his early years isolated. In his solitude, drawing progressively became his only friend, and ultimately his life. In 1935, by the age of 11, he was awarded First Extraordinary Prize of the Press Association at the Manchego Children’s Art Exhibition.
After the Civil War, he completed his bachelor’s studies at the Ciudad Real School of Arts (under Manuel Mendía and Jerónimo Luna in artistic drawing and of Jerónimo López-Salazar Martínez in modelling and casting). Thanks to a scholarship awarded by the council of this province, he moved to Madrid in 1942. There he immediately began his studies at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His first exhibition took place in 1948 in Ciudad Real and at the Sala Macarrón in Madrid. In 1949, he was awarded a scholarship to study in Rome, prompting him to move to Italy where he came in contact with the frescoes of Italian 13th century artists, in particular those by Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. This passion for murals steered the rest of his career, namely academically. Indeed, in 1959 he was appointed Professor of Mural Painting and Pictorial Procedures at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University in Madrid, a position he held until his retirement.
The year following his arrival in Italy proved to be a busy one, as he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Mostra delle Accademie in Rome, and the Selective of Spanish Artists in the Festival Hall in Rome and Naples. Italy was only be the beginning of his travels, with López-Villaseñor subsequently travelling through England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
As previously mentioned, in the plethora of work he produced through the years, murals hold a special place in his corpus. His murals of the Basilica of Atocha in Madrid, the Zaragoza Provincial Council, the Ciudad Real Provincial Council, and murals for the School of High Mercantile Studies in Barcelona and the Zaragoza Provincial Council are among his most famous and revered.
Throughout his career, López-Villaseñor received numerous prizes and awards: First at the Hispano-American Art Biennial (1951); First Gold Medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts (1952, for his painting The Martyr’s Body); First Prize at the International Exhibition of Agrigento (Italy, 1952); Award from the Ministry of Information and Tourism in Seville (1954); Gold Mill Award at the Valdepeñas Regional Exhibition (1954, for the mural Tribute to Iberia); the Rodríguez Acosta Foundation Award (1958); Ibarra Prize (1959); Grand Prize of the fifth Biennial of the Mediterranean in Alexandria (Egypt, 1965); and the Pablo Iglesias Prize (1985), among others.
In 1956 he was appointed corresponding academic of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
López-Villaseñor passed away in 1996. His three heirs donated a total of 162 of his works to the City Council of Ciudad Real, which were incorporated into a museum named after the artist located in the province’s capital.
