Ángel Ferrant

Ángel Ferrant Vázquez (Madrid 1890 – 1961) was a Spanish avant-garde sculptor related to surrealism and kinetic art. The painter Alejandro Ferrant studied sculpture at the School of Arts and Crafts of Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts San Fernando and in the workshop of the sculptor Aniceto Marinas. The first works, among which the La Cuesta de la Vida (Museo del Prado), for which he obtained a second medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1910, are inscribed in the In 1913 he traveled to Paris where he came into contact with Futurism, and although he was not a futurist, Marinetti’s influence with the one who had an epistolary relationship made his sculpture evolve.

Upon obtaining a position as professor of modeling and emptying, he was assigned to the School of Arts and Trades of La Coruña, where he resided for two years, until his transfer in 1920 to the school of the Lonja in Barcelona.uí remained until 1934, When he finally settled in Madrid as a teacher of the School of Arts and Crafts of Carabanchel.n Barcelona approached the artists of the noucentisme and the avant-gardes, whose influence is noticed in the school, for which he won the first prize of the National Competition Of Sculpture of 1926.Becado by the Board of Extension of Studies, in 1927 traveled to Vienna looking for a renovation of the pedagogical methods of the education of the sculpture.

During these years of permanence in Barcelona he exhibited in various galleries and with different groups such as the 1st Exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists, in which he presented two nudes influenced by primitive art, 3 the Saló dels Evolucionistes, the Sant Lluc Circle, The Association of Sculptors and Friends of the New Arts (ADLAN). A group related to surrealism founded in 1931 with Ángel Ferrant as a very active member. In 1936 he participated in the Logicofobist Exhibition of Barcelona, ​​fully integrated in the surrealist movement, in which he participated Also the one that had been his pupil Eudald Serra.rrant began in these years his investigations on the objects, testing new artistic materials within the aesthetics of the objet trouvé.In the same years he began his contacts with the American Alexander Calder, of which the Friends Of the New Arts exhibited their miniature Circus.

At the beginning of the war he signed the “Manifesto of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture” published in the newspaper La voz of July 30, 1936.At the beginning of 1937 he joined the Delegate Board of Seizure, Protection and Rescue of the Artistic Treasure created on December 15, 1936, which had as president Robert Fernández Balbuena and as a vocal to his brother, the architect Alejandro Ferrant. One of his missions as a technical assistant consisted of organizing the photographic file of the collected works By the Board. At the same time was appointed accidental director of the Museum of Modern Art, when Ricardo Gutiérrez Abascal moved to Valencia, and president of the Section of the Artistic Treasure of the Central Council of Archives, Libraries and Artistic Treasure, charges of little effective effectiveness To remain closed the museum and to become the Central Council in an empty superstructure of content. On 27 May, he was arrested at the Junta’s premises by agents of the Military Investigation Service of the Center’s army who had detained the architect Francisco Ordeig the night before, who was responsible for the deposit that the Seizure Board held in the San Francisco church. Grande, along with a son of this and the officials of the Board and members of the Republican National Guard in charge of the custody of the works of art deposited there, who were accused of collusion with the enemy. 30 the Ferrant brothers were released, following the intervention of Fernández Balbuena and the comrades of the Junta, who warned in the accusations made by agents of the information brigade exaggerations and forced interpretations of statements heard by confidantes. Opinion, there was no other reason for the arrest than the friendship with Ordeig, finally tried in Barcelona a year later.

On 1 July he was appointed member of the Delegate Board, responsible for visits and seizures by the peoples of the central region, among other varied tasks. In January 1938, after the appointment of Fernández Balbuena as delegate in Madrid of the Directorate General of Fine Arts and deputy director of the Prado Museum, Ángel Ferrant was in charge of the presidency of the Delegate Board of the Artistic Treasure in Madrid. Requests from those responsible for the ministry and the management of Fine Arts were the cause of continuous shocks. March presented its resignation – that soon retired – after refusing to send to Valencia The descent of the cross of Rogier van der Weyden. In April of 1938 he was called to Barcelona where he remained until the month of June, leaving Matilde López Serrano, agent of the Francoist SIPM as head of the Board. On September 6, the responsible of the Ministry of Finance, to which the competences on the Artistic Treasure had been transferred, proceeded to remodel the Delegated Boards, to the front of which the civil governors were placed and Ferrant remained as technical auxiliary without executive functions.

After the war, he was denounced along with his brother by the Duke of Valencia, whose properties had been saved thanks to the Delegated Board of Madrid. Submitted to disciplinary proceedings, in April he submitted an exculpatory brief detailing his actions at the head of the Delegate Board. Pedro Muguruza, curator general of the National Artistic Patrimony Defense Service, presented a report to the Military Court of Officials in which he acknowledged the role played by the Delegated Board in Madrid in order to preserve the heritage. At the end of the contest, he recovered the artistic creation he had abandoned in times of war. And in this order, the series of reliefs in clay from Tauromachy (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), dated in 1939, Figurative art from presuppositions foreign to academicism.

In 1943 he was commissioned by the architects Durán de Cottes and López Izquierdo to collaborate with a sculptural set for the facade of the Teatro Albéniz in Madrid, as a reinterpretation of the façade-altarpiece of Hispanic Baroque architecture. It consisted of eleven figures, eleven wooden automata which, by means of a simple mechanism of crankshafts and a motor, moved the articulated parts (playing a guitar, fanning, swinging the torso, which were preserved in the facade until 1983, when Were taken to an exhibition, to be sheltered in future in the foyer of the teatro.r economic needs accepted some other orders, as part of the reliefs of the column of the Discovery in La Rabida, 3 but at the same time returned to work on objects found -conches, stones, sticks-assembled in constructions of “useless expression.”

In 1948 he met the German painter Mathias Goeritz and his School of Altamira, who will enhance the work with objects of stone or clay in which human figures are insinuated.n Goeritz published figures of the sea, a book with German texts and drawings by Ferrant . 1949 he exhibited his mobiles, near Calder, and his counterpoint, the series of Static sculptures. 1960 won the special sculpture award at the XXX Venice Biennale.