Francisco Riba-Rovira also known as Francesc or Paco, (born Barcelona 1913, died Paris 2002) was a Spanish painter, from Catalonia.
Biography
He worked to pay for his Beaux-Arts studies in Barcelona. He succeeded in this for one or two months before the start of the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought against the rebellion led by Francisco Franco against the established Government of the Second Spanish Republic. After the war he was forced into exile in France, first in Perpignan or near to be in a Camp as prisoner on a beach.
The Second World War began a few months later. In Gertrude Stein's exhibition preface, it notes that Riba-Rovira was arrested by the Gestapo. The Nazi soldiers who kept him prisoner were Netherlands Nazi SS. After an attempted escape for the second time he succeeded to escape from this camp, which was near Vannes in French Britain, he chose the day it was raining a lot for impeach the dogs feeling after him. And for that he had to fight against one Nazi SS Dutch soldier. He did it. After the war he talked about, that he learned what a few days after he escapes from the camp, a train was made by the Nazis for red Spanish republican soldiers for expedition to Mathausen. And very few people know that this Mathausen camp was harder than Dachau and even Buchenwald Dora just below Auschwitz for concentration camp part. Mathausen was the only one concentration camp put in the category number 3.
He met Gertrude Stein when she was passing by with her dog "Basket" on the Seine docks. The following is a translation from Stein's preface to the exhibition by Francisco Riba-Rovira at Roquepine Gallery in May 1945:
It is inevitable that when we really need someone we find him. The person you need attracts you like a magnet. I returned to Paris after these long years spent in the countryside and I needed a young painter, a young painter who would awaken me. Paris was magnificent, but where was the young painter? I looked everywhere: at my contemporaries and their followers. I walked a lot, I looked everywhere, in all the galleries, but the young painter was not there. Yes, I walk a lot, a lot at the edge of the Seine where we fish, where we paint, where we walk dogs (I am one of those who walk their dogs). Not a single young painter! One day, on the corner of a street, in one of these small streets in my district, I saw a man painting. I looked at him; at him and at his painting, as I always look at everybody who creates something I have an indefatigable curiosity to look and I was moved. Yes, a young painter! We began to speak, because we speak easily, as easily as in country roads, in the small streets of the district. His story was the sad story of the young people of our time. A young Spaniard who studied in fine arts in Barcelona: civil war; exile; a concentration camp; escape. Gestapo, another prison, another escape. Eight lost years! If they were lost, who knows? And now a little misery, but all the same the painting. Why did I find that it was him the young painter, why? I visited his drawings, his painting: we speak. I explained that for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne nearly made, instead of basing itself on what he almost managed to make. When he could not make a thing, he hijacked it and left it. He insisted on showing his incapacity: he spread his lack of success: showing what he could not do, became an obsession for him. People influenced by him were also obsessed by the things which they could not reach and they began the system of camouflage. It was natural to do so, even inevitable:that soon became an art, in peace and in war, and Matisse concealed and insisted at the same time on that Cézanne could not realize, and Picasso concealed, played and tormented all these things. The only one who wanted to insist on this problem, was Juan Gris. He persisted by deepening the things which Cézanne wanted to do, but it was too hard a task for him: it killed him. And now here we are, I find a young painter who does not follow the tendency to play with what Cézanne could not do, but who attacks any right the things which he tried to make, to create the objects which have to exist, for, and in themselves, and not in relation. This young painter has his weakness and his strength. His force will push him in this road. I am fascinated and that is why he is the young painter who I needed. He is Francisco Riba-Rovira. – Sources: