Sergio de Castro Franco-Argentinian, 1922-2012

SERGIO DE CASTRO’S EARLY LIFE AND ARTISTIC TRAINING

Born on 15 September 1922 in Buenos Aires, Sergio de Castro spent his childhood between Lausanne, Switzerland, and Turin, Italy. The young Sergio learned Spanish in Uruguay and began writing his first poems. In 1939, at the age of 17, Sergio de Castro walked along the Uruguayan coast by himself, travelling from Montevideo to Brazil. It was then that he met Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949), an artist whose teaching would play a decisive role in the Argentine’s development. At his father’s request, Sergio de Castro spent a year studying architecture; meanwhile, he was already active as a composer and also began to explore drawing and painting.

SERGIO DE CASTRO AND MUSIC

A multi-talented and precocious artist, Sergio de Castro also expressed himself through music, which he studied from 1933 to 1938. He wrote musical works that were performed in concert for the first time in 1940 at the University of Montevideo. It was then that he was spotted by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and the composer Alberto Ginastera.

In 1945, Sergio de Castro moved to Córdoba in Argentina, where he worked as the assistant of the composer Manuel de Falla for 18 months, until the latter’s death. In 1947, the actress Cecilia Ingenieros—a student ofthe dancer MarthaGraham—staged a ballet at the Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires based on Sergio de Castro’s musical work Doce variationes breves. Two years later, he was appointed as a professor of music history at the new conservatory in La Plata, Argentina. With the help of a grant from the French government, Sergio de Castro moved to Paris in 1949 to complete his musical training. The following year, he joined the music group Zodiaque, which was headed by the composer Maurice Ohana.

Although Sergio de Castro eventually put music aside to devote himself to painting, he was still regularly invited to musical events. The Maillon cultural center (in Strasbourg), for example, exhibited a series of works during a musical week dedicated to Maurice Ohana and the music of the Hesperides in 1986. In the same year, Sergio de Castro was invited to the Festival des Musiques Actuelles Nice Côte d’Azur (the ‘MANCA’ Festival). In 1992, Silvina Luz Mansilla published the first volume of her Diccionario De La Musica Espanola E Hispanoamericana in Spain, which included a text on the musical work of Sergio de Castro.

THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO IN ARGENTINA

Sergio de Castro settled in Buenos Aires in 1942 and had his first exhibition at the Ateneo de Montevideo. His work was also exhibited at the Torres Garcia studio—an organisation founded in 1943 by the artist Joaquín Torres-García to enable young artists to access training. The following year, Sergio de Castro, Joaquín Torres-García and his students worked together on a series of murals for the Martirené Pavilion of the Saint-Bois Hospital in Montevideo. Sergio de Castro took part in the group exhibition Pintura uruguaya, which was held at Comte Gallery in Buenos Aires, in the same year. In 1946, he travelled to the northwest of Argentina and the south of Peru to study pre-Columbian art, accompanied by the painters Gonzalo Fonseca, Julio Alpuy and Jonio Montiel.

Sergio de Castro moved back to Buenos Aires in 1947. The following year, he was presented at the Salon of the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts. His works were also presented at the Viao Gallery, the Bonino Gallery and the Van Riel Gallery. In 1987, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires organised a retrospective dedicated to the artist’s work, which presented some one hundred works.

THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO IN FRANCE

Sergio de Castro was awarded a grant by the French government in 1949 and settled permanently in Paris in November of the same year. In 1950,the artist was hospitalized due to severe asthma attacks at the Necker Hospital in Paris, where he spent much time drawing. The following year, he painted a monumental work in oil on canvas measuring 160 x 300 cm, which he called El Puerto. From then on, he retired from his activities as a composer to devote himself to painting and stained-glass work. In 1952, Sergio de Castro had his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Jeanne Castel, where he presented a collection of still lifes. Starting to paint with egg tempera, he went on to exhibit his works at the Galerie Pierre. He was also represented in the French capital by the Galerie Max Kaganovich, the Galerie Rive-Gauche and the Galerie Charpentier.

Sergio de Castro met many artists—such as Picasso, whom he met in Paris and in the South of France where he went in summer—and exhibited alongside Bazaine, Picasso, Lanskoy and de Staël. In 1953, Sergio de Castro set up his studio at 16 bis Rue du Saint-Gothard in Paris’ 14th arrondissement, where he began work on his large linear compositions.

The artist became a naturalised French citizen in 1979 and was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1999. In 2003, he made preparations for a donation of works to the Museum of Saint-Lô (Normandy) with the curator Michel Carduner. In 2006, the entire donation (comprising 220 works) was presented to the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Histoire in Saint-Lô.

STAINED GLASS IN SERGIO DE CASTRO’S WORK

Sergio de Castro was a multi-faceted artist. In addition to paintings and music, he also created a number of stained glass works. In 1956, Sergio de Castro began work on a monumental stained-glass work entitled La Création du Monde [The Creation of the World]. Measuring 6 x 20 metres, the work was designed for the church of the Benedictine Monastery of Saint-Sacrement in Couvrechef-la-Folie, near Caen—a building rebuilt after the war.In 1968,he created a 4.5 x 17 metres stained glass window for the 1st Lutheran Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche in Hamburg. In 1979, Sergio de Castro began work on the composition of five stained glass windows for the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Romont, Fribourg (Switzerland), which were installed two years later. In 1980, he was invited to the 1st Salon of Stained Glass at the International Stained-Glass Centre in Chartres, France, where he presented Résurrection, a stained-glass work measuring 4.2 x 1.2 metres.

The 1st Festival of Contemporary Sacred Art presented an exhibition dedicated to Sergio de Castro with 72 works from 1948-1978 on religious subjects at the Musée Diocésain d’Art Religieux in 1988. In the book Les Trésors de la France, published in 1988, the author Michel Parent wrote two texts in the section on “Contemporary Stained Glass”, entitled Audincourt et Fernand Léger and La Folie-Couvrechef et Sergio de Castro. In 2008, the Saint-Lô Museum presented the exhibition 50 ans d’Art du Vitrail autour de Sergio de Castro and then inaugurated the stained-glass windows Abécédaire and Chiffres in 2012.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION FOR THE ARTIST SERGIO DE CASTRO

Several retrospectives have been devoted to the artist in many countries. Sergio de Castro went to the United Kingdom for the first time in 1957 and had his first solo exhibition in London at the Matthiesen Gallery the following year. In 1962, the editor of Apollo magazine, Denys Sutton, organised an exhibition of his work at the Leicester Gallery before publishing a monograph on Sergio de Castro in 1964. A solo exhibition of the artist’s work entitled Homages and Variations was presented at the French Institute in London in 1987, exhibiting 30 works from 1957-1975 inspired by Dürer, Holbein, El Greco and Vermeer.

Sergio de Castro also had strong ties to Switzerland, his childhood home. His work was presented in 1958 in Lucerne at the Kunst-Museum in a group exhibition entitled Junge Maler aus Deutschland und Frankreich. In 1966, the artist was presented in a major retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Fribourg, where 103 of the artist’s works were shown. A solo exhibition of Sergio de Castro’s work was organised at the Castle of Gruyères in 2008.

Sergio de Castro’s work also became well known in Germany, where it was featured at the Documenta II exhibition in Kassel in 1959. Hans Platte organised the first retrospective of Sergio de Castro’s work in an exhibition comprising 110 works at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1965. The following year, the exhibition Variationnen über ein Thema organised by Thomas Grochowiak at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen presented eight variations on Le Greco by Sergio de Castro. The exhibition would include works by Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among others.

In Italy, Sergio de Castro participated in the Biennale Francia-Italia at the Palazzo delle Arte al Valentino in Turin in 1956. The gallery owner Bruno Lorenzelli then presented 40 works by the artist in Milan in 1963 and in Bergamo in 1964. In 1980, Sergio de Castro participated in the 39th Venice Biennale, where he presented large format works from the 1970s in the Argentine Pavilion.

Sergio de Castro was also exhibited in the United States. In 1960, the artist won the fourth prize in the Fifth International Hallmark Art Award alongside the painters Alechinsky, Marsicano and Charchoune. In 1995, he participated in a group exhibition at the Chac-Mool Gallery in Los Angeles.

Sergio de Castro died in Paris on 31 December 2012. He was laid to rest in the Montparnasse cemetery.