Manuel (1872) Otero Sold at Auction Prices

MANUEL MUÑOZ Y OTERO (Jerez de la frontera, c. 1850). "View of Tangier", 1877. Oil on canvas.

MANUEL MUÑOZ Y OTERO (Jerez de la frontera, c. 1850). "View of Tangier", 1877. Oil on canvas. Preserves period frame with faults. Presents label on the back. Signed and dated in the lower left corner. Measurements. 50 x 69 cm; 73 x 92 cm (frame). In this view the author presents us with an almost panoramic scene, which allows us to make out both the landscape and the actions of the characters in it. Open the road in the foreground, this defines a great depth where a foreground with the figures is structured, followed by another where the landscape is developed and finally the presence of the city in the distance and the sea with the horizon. By the clothing and attitudes of the characters, the landscape, etc., this scene can be inscribed within the current of orientalism, which was born in the nineteenth century as a result of the romantic spirit of escape in time and space. The first orientalists sought to reflect the lost, the unattainable, in a dramatic journey destined from the beginning to failure. Like Flaubert in "Salambo", painters painted detailed portraits of the Orient and imagined pasts, recreated to the millimeter but ultimately unknown and idealized. During the second half of the 19th century, however, many of the painters who traveled to the Middle East in search of this invented reality discovered a different and new country, which stood out with its peculiarities above the clichés and prejudices of Europeans. Thus, this new orientalist school leaves behind the beautiful odalisques, the harems and the slave markets to paint nothing but what they see, the real Orient in all its daily dimension. Along with the change of vision comes a technical and formal change; since it is no longer a matter of recreating an imagined world in all its details, the brushstroke acquires impressionist fluency, and the artists focus not so much on the depiction of the types and customs as on the faithful reflection of the atmosphere of the place, of the very identity of the North African populations. Manuel Muñoz y Otero was an Andalusian painter, linked to the school of painting, sculpture and engraving, formed under the influence of the artist José Cala (Jerez de la Frontera, 1850, c. 1891). Despite the few biographical data on the artist, it is known that in 1876, Muñoz y Otero was presented at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid, with a painting of orientalist theme, and a year later, in 1887, he participated in the Paris Exhibition, where he also returned to an orientalist theme.