Francisco Sainz
1923-1998

Francisco Sainz was born in Santander, Spain in 1923, the son of a railway worker and a teacher. Dreaming of a bullfighting career, he left home at the age of 14 to live with cousins in Madrid. Still in his mid-teens, he was swept up in an event that would forever mark his life and work - the Spanish Civil War. He took part in activities directed against Franco's insurgent fascist forces, and was briefly arrested as a result. For the next few years, he remained active in underground opposition to Franco, and lived under an assumed name. While taking art courses in Barcelona in 1944 under the famed painter, Francisco Sainz de la Maza, he did not feel safe telling the master that they shared the same name.

In 1944, Sainz left Spain for Portugal, where the Mexican Embassy granted him political asylum in Mexico. En route by ship to Mexico in 1945, he was convinced by a fellow Spaniard on board to join the substantial Spanish community in New York, and he jumped ship. Although he would always miss Spain - as a political dissident, he did not feel safe to pay a return visit until the late 1960s, in Franco's last years - he came to love New York and he dove, with characteristic enthusiasm, into the Greenwich Village and East Hampton artist communities. Sainz was part of an East Hampton artist community that at the time included Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He was also a friend of Jack Kerouac, who lived nearby in the East Village. Sainz's second marriage, in 1969, took place in the Village's Washington Square Park. The marriage was covered by Life Magazine as a major artistic happening and a prime illustration of the new era of creative outdoor ceremonies.

Sainz's extremely varied body of work reflects experimentation in a number of different genres, and could place him in different categories as a result, but he was a member of the New York School of artists that included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Esteben Vicente, Miilton Resnick and others. Besides the series of abstract works featured in this show, he created a vast collection of representational paintings, including landscapes and portraits of friends, historical figures and fellow artists. The portraits have a quality of stopped time, as if the subjects are aware of something taking place which is larger than the moment. Sainz brings a novel perspective to the portraits that is sometimes humorous, sometimes angrily political. Among the more striking portrayals are himself as Saint Francis; Willem de Kooning as a Dutch admiral; Franco as a hunter holding a killed rabbit whose still dripping blood formed the map of Spain.

During the 1970s, Sainz started making primitive masks, a new medium which remained a passion the rest of his life. Like his paintings, the masks often offer a surprise, such as a reverse side with a dramatically different face or a hidden compartment. Although the masks sometimes represented somber shamans and sorcerers, they were for Sainz benign figures, and represented the only "insurance policy" he ever carried for his house or artwork. For him, the wisdom reflected in ancient art was an antidote to the stress and violence of our times.

Sainz's work sometimes drew attention to the ills of modern society, but the artist enthusiastically embraced his times and his surroundings. He lived simply, but not austerely.

He was the lively raconteur at a dinner party, the master chef who cooked paella for feasts with up to two hundred guests on the shores of East Hampton. The man and the artist conveyed a resilient optimism, and a sense that both personal and political tragedy can be overcome in the pursuit of inner peace, as well as peace among nations.

Sainz left a daughter, Elena, and a son, Daniel.

The house in New York City which Sainz owned and worked in, 151 Avenue B, is now known as The Charlie Parker Residence, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in l994, and in 1999 the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Charlie Parker Residence a New York City Landmark.
You can find more info here - www.charlieparkerresidence.net