Portrait of a Woman

Between 1964 and 1981, Manolo Valdés produced Pop Art-related images with fellow artist Rafael Solbes (Spanish, 1940–1981) under the group name Equipo Crónica; a third collaborator, Juan Antonio Toledo (Spanish, born 1940), left after the first year. Their imagery was highly graphic (flat and colorful), often politically charged (primarily against Franco's regime), and frequently appropriated from Spanish art history and culture. Following Solbes' death, Valdés began a second career as a solo artist, continuing his use of appropriated images from art history, but without the political overtones and slick painting style that had characterized Equipo Crónica's work. Quoting figures from well-known works of art by old masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fra Angelico, as well as twentieth-century masters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, Valdés revitalizes these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure's size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating a lot of roughly applied paint and unusual materials. Here, he reinterprets the central figure in Fra Filippo Lippi's Portrait of a Man and Woman at a Casement (ca. 1440), in The Met's collection (89.15.19).