Calle Eduardo Vicente

Calle Eduardo Vicente, in the Guindalera, recalls a painter who carried Madrid in his blood. He was born in 1909 in an unusual place for a future artist: the Civil Guard barracks on calle Batalla de Salado, where his father served as an officer. He trained at the Royal School of Fine Arts of San Fernando and hung his first works at the Ateneo in 1928. In 1932 he joined the Traveling Museum of the Pedagogical Missions, which brought art to the villages. The Civil War set him drawing posters for the Republican Army; some pieces traveled to the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris Exhibition, the same one where the Guernica hung. The postwar years left him aside until friendship with José María de Cossío and the support of Eugenio d’Ors reopened doors. He ended up in the so-called Madrid School, beside Benjamín Palencia and Rafael Zabaleta. He died on 9 May 1968 in his studio on calle García de Paredes, with an exhibition about to open that he never saw.