Marineros y otros - photographs by Gregorio Prieto and Eduardo Chicharro Briones, circa 1929-31

 

Marineros.

The two young Spaniards, Prieto and Chicharro Briones, met as colleagues at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, became friends, and collaborated on a series of experimental photographs. Prieto devised the scenes and was the primary model for the images, while Chicharro Briones worked the camera and handled the technical side of the endeavor. Prieto had a particular fascination with sailors at the time, apparently identifying so strongly with the archetype that he wandered the streets and towns of Italy dressed as one.

Deukalion.

El péndulo.

Recuerdo de Roma.

Marinero durmiendo.

Herida por la belleza clásica.

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Gregorio Prieto Muñoz (2 May 1897, Valdepeñas - 14 November 1992, Valdepeñas), Spanish painter associated with the Generation of '27, an influential group of avant-garde Spanish poets and artists that gradually formed between 1923 and 1927. The eighth son of a cabinet-maker, he started drawing and then painting at the age of four. When he was seven, the family moved to Madrid. At eighteen he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and, after being awarded several scholarships, he moved to Paris in 1925 where he had his first contact with Cubism and the Surrealists. Three years later, he received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome - Real Academia de España en Roma - where he remained until 1932.

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Eduardo Chicharro Briones (13 June 1905, Madrid - 15 March 1964, Madrid), Spanish painter and poet, founder and one of the main theorists of Postism, an avant-garde movement that emerged in Spain in the mid-1940s. The son of Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who had been court painter to King Alfonso XIII, when he was seven his family moved to Rome; he remained there until the age of twenty. In 1925, after completing his military service in Spain, he returned to Rome on a scholarship granted by the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. He remained there until 1935.

Rome, 1929. Depending on the source, this portrait is captioned as being Prieto and Chicharro Briones, or merely the former and an amigo.