GODOFREDO ORTEGA MUÑOZ (San Vicente de Alcántara, Badajoz, 1899 - Madrid, 1982). "Landscape of Lake Maggiore", ca.1920-30. Oil on cardboard. Provenance: -Private collection, Massimo Uccelli, Italy. Inherited from his grandparents, in turn, received it from the painter while he lived in his house in Via Antonio Rosmini, in Stresa, near Lake Maggiore (Italy). -Private collection, Turin. With certificate of the Ortega Muñoz Foundation. With export permit from Italy and Spain. Measurements: 51 x 60 cm. Ortega Muñoz lived in this area of northern Italy, close to the Swiss border, so he represented it on numerous occasions, showing a great handling of the shades and lights of this cold and limpid border region. Ortega, heir to the school of Vallecas, often prioritized this type of stark landscapes, realistic but far from academic, that take us into wide and lonely spaces that awaken our genuine emotionality. The trees with bare branches occupy a first line behind which the mountainous landscape of Lake Maggiore opens up, outlined in the background by bluish specks of snowy peaks. Ortega Muñoz was one of the great creators of the contemporary Spanish landscape. He started in art when he was still a child, in a self-taught way, and despite his father's advice, in 1919, when he was twenty years old, he decided to move to Madrid to devote himself to painting. There he will dedicate himself from the first moment to making copies of the great masters in the Prado Museum and in the old Museum of Modern Art. He continued his self-taught training and began to paint outdoors in the surroundings of the Dehesa de la Villa, accompanied by other young artists such as the Filipino Fernando Amorsolo. A year later he decided to move to Paris, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet Gil Bel. In Paris he also got to know the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, but at the same time he experienced the formal and ideological crisis that was developing in this interwar period, which would lead him to leave France to travel south, to Italy, where he would find in the masters of the past more authentic values of spirituality, simplicity and purity. Ortega Muñoz will travel through Italy from North to South between 1921 and 1922, and in Lago Maggiore he meets the English painter Edward Rowley Smart, with whom he will spend a short period of apprenticeship. With him Ortega Muñoz comes to the conclusion that, in the face of the apparent unreasonableness of contemporary art, it is necessary to return to nature and return to are the authenticity of spiritual truths and simple emotions. In 1926 he returned to Spain, where he was the protagonist of one of the founding excursions of the Vallecas School. Shortly afterwards, in 1927, he held his first exhibition at the Círculo Mercantil in Zaragoza. Then he leaves Spain again, and this time he travels through Central Europe, passing through Zurich, Brussels and several German cities. In 1928, in Worpswede, he comes into contact with a colony of artists of expressionist language, interested in landscapes and peasant life, as a reaction against the sophisticated artifices and refinements of the avant-garde. Notably influenced by his experience in Worpswede, Ortega Muñoz returns to France in 1928, and between 1930 and 1933 he continues to travel between Central Europe and Northern Italy; he finally arrives in Cairo in 1933, a date at which his skills as a portraitist have provided him with a comfortable lifestyle and important contacts. He exhibits in Alexandria with an enormous success, which will lead him to repeat the experience a year later, presenting an almost anthological exhibition in which his love for nature, the balance between color and mood, and the atmosphere of stillness and sadness characteristic of his language can already be appreciated. In 1935 he returns to Spain and the following year he presents an exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. However, the Civil War forced him to leave Spain; after the war he returned to his hometown, and finally reunited with the silent and lonely expanse of his landscape and with the close reality of that world that he felt as authentically his own.