Óscar Domínguez valuation
Canary Islands Surrealist who made decalcomania a Surrealist method and painted the volcanic landscapes of Tenerife.
Óscar Domínguez was born at San Cristóbal de La Laguna in Tenerife in 1906 and spent much of his youth at Tacoronte, in the north of the island, among its volcanic landscapes.
What a work by Óscar Domínguez is worth
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Bio
Óscar Domínguez was born at San Cristóbal de La Laguna in Tenerife in 1906 and spent much of his youth at Tacoronte, in the north of the island, among its volcanic landscapes. At twenty-one he went to Paris to work for his father, who exported produce from the island, and began to paint. He met Breton and Éluard in 1933 and joined the Surrealists, and in 1935 the International Surrealist Exhibition was held in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 1936 he took up decalcomania, pressing gouache between sheets and pulling them apart to make chance landscapes, and made it a Surrealist technique that Max Ernst and others adopted. Later work moved through a cosmic period and towards Picasso. He took his own life in Paris on the last day of 1957.
The Surrealist works of the 1930s are the heart of the market, including the decalcomanias, which are works on paper and fragile. The output of the 1940s and 1950s is larger and more uneven, and Domínguez is widely forged, so a documented provenance and expert opinion are essential for any significant work.
Les Halles, Tenerife and 1938
In Paris Domínguez first worked for his father's business in the central market of Les Halles. The Tenerife exhibition of 1935, organised with the review Gaceta de Arte and attended by André Breton and Benjamin Péret, was one of the first international Surrealist exhibitions outside Paris.
In August 1938, in a quarrel with the painter Esteban Francés, he threw a glass that cost Victor Brauner his left eye. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
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