About my blog

I am Enrique Garcia-Herraiz and I have decided to start  this blog at the age of 85 with  two investigations related to the two painters I most admire, Velazquez and Picasso. Yes, I lived and worked hard in New York as a director of the Spanish National Tourist Office which was located first at Madison Avenue and 52nd and later around 1970 in the heart of that great avenue, the Fifth and 48th St. where the architect who created the fantastic Spanish Pavillion of the New York World Fair of 1967, Javier Carvajal, designed an elegant space for the new office with two floors. In the lower of them I opened an art Gallery which I called Spain. We had also a wonderful show window to the avenue and I took the task out of necessity of making the decorations that were usualy changed every month.I used posters, folkloric dresses and hats sent from the Ministry in Madrid and exceptionally Salvador Dalí to whom I knew and visited at the St. Regis Hotel once contributed with a living display of signing the sail of a boat from the navigator Vital Aza  in front of a great crowd in the street. Later  I helped to locate and bring back to Spain the rich collection of Dalí´s works stored at Morgan Manhattan  When I returned to New York in  1982, we had a new office  decorated by the abstract Spanish artist José Guerrero in the style of a  Granada cave.  Since I was so near the Museum of Modern Art I became a frecquent visitor of its marvelous collection. The stars were, then,  the two masterpieces of Picasso: Les Demoiselles d´Avignon and the Guernica. The Director William Rubin of the MOMA was the staunch defender of holding the Guernica but fortunately the big canvas was sent to Spain as prescribed by its author when a democratic regime was established.  I became the correspondent of GOYA, the art magazine of the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano. Carlos Areán recommended me to the director Camón Aznar when Barbara Rose left in pursue of her great art career.  My "Crónicas de Nueva York” were published from 1969 till 1972 and afterwards again in the late seventies and a few more from Washington when in 1984, I came back to the U.S.  to be Information Counselor at the Embassy in Washington D.C. I used to visit the galleries of New York on Saturday the day of the week I was free and happens to be the most popular day among gallerygoers of the Big Apple. But New York was also the biggest repository of secrets and discoveries of art works lost or misattributted of the world. And the auction houses with its continuos programming of sales attracted my curiosity as well as the museums and galleries.In my writtings on art the element of discovery is very often present and I am not ashamed of it. I have a long standing project which I probably will let aside for a post mortem publication.:My memories as an art collector and writer. Around  1999 I presented the first version to my friend Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. "Yes -, he told me after keeping the manuscript for a few days - "there is a book here but you must change the structure". I always doubt about the title: "Memorias de un coleccionista de arte distraído" o "Memorias de un descubridor de arte"  This is the dilemma. This is the way it is..  I tell now my two frustrations. I can’t find a reliable magazine who dares to publish : “ A Reivindication of Picassos´s years at the Llotja School of Barcelona” Indiference about the formative years of Picasso? Or fear to offend the memory of the School director Federico Marés? The second is my discovery of an important  portrait of ...Velázquez.:  “ El prototipo  perdido del retrato que Velázquez hizo a Felipe IV al regreso de su primer viaje a Italia” .In the meantime they will be housed in this blog.  Picasso adolescent and Velázquez royal portraits The two areas of art research I have concentrated my best attention, hard work and good eye.But I will comment about other subjects of the fanciful and  surpraising world of art. En español or  in English.

E.G-H. April 2013