Antonio Cobos Soto (1908-2001) - Escena daliniana

This is a mixed media technique on paper

Signed at the bottom (Cobos)

Presented framed

Drawing measurements: 40 cm high x 28 cm wide

Frame measurements: 59 cm high x 48 cm wide

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BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST:

Antonio Cobos Soto was born in Guadalajara on December 16, 1908, the son of a magistrate of the Audiencia, which caused him to have a peripatetic early childhood, until the family settled permanently in Madrid in 1915. In Madrid, and in El Escorial during the summers, the entire life of Antonio Cobos unfolded until his death, after his nineties, on May 29, 2001.

During his high school years at the Jesuit school of Areneros, Antonio stood out not only for his other talents but for his ease with drawing, which drew the admiration of teachers and fellow students. While studying, on his own, Law studies, reluctantly following the family tradition, he began making his first forays as an advertising illustrator, before turning twenty.

Having earned a Law degree (1930), he began his work as a regular illustrator of novels, short stories, and poems in the magazine “Blanco y Negro.” In 1932, together with other illustrators such as Federico Ribas Montenegro (1890-1952), Rafael de Penagos (1889-1954), Roberto Martínez Baldrich (1895-1959), the Argentine Aníbal Tejada Cassio (1897- ¿…?), and Aristo Téllez, he founded the Unión de Dibujantes Españoles (UDE).

In 1933 he joined the editorial staff of “El Debate,” owned by Editorial Católica, as art editor, and it is here where he befriended Luis Ortiz Muñoz, who infected him with his enthusiasm for Sevillian Holy Week.

After the Civil War, Cobos remained linked to the Catholic press, through the newspaper “Ya,” successor to “El Debate,” but with plenty of free time to devote to book illustration. Many books were illustrated during this period, but I will mention only the three most significant published in the forties: “Epos de los Destinos” by Eugenio d’Ors; “Guerra y Victoria de España (1936-1939)” by Manuel Aznar, and the already mentioned “Glorias imperiales” by Luis Ortiz Muñoz (the last two published by Editorial Magisterio Español, which I have in my library).

In 1941 Cobos won the first medal in the National Contest “Estampas de la Pasión” and first prize in the contest “Estampas del Quijote,” organized by the Instituto Nacional del Libro.

Surely under the influence of his friend Ortiz Muñoz, director of the center, Antonio Cobos joined that same year the faculty of the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute where he taught the subject “History of Art” and created the murals in the assembly hall, a successful result that led to further commissions for public bodies in Madrid (Church of the Social Training School, Córdoba (triptych of the high altar in the Chapel of the Laboral University), Tangier (lobby of the Instituto de Enseñanza Media, 1948) and Seville (frescoes on the ground floor of the National Radio headquarters).

In the early fifties Ya commissioned Cobos to write theater reviews and soon after art criticism, which he devoted to during the last thirty years of his life until his retirement in 1980. Antonio Cobos, Dean of the Spanish Association of Art Critics for many years, died on May 29, 2001.

This biographical note would not be complete without mentioning his work as a designer for the Hermandad de la Amargura in Seville, where he joined as a brother with Ortiz Muños, whose catalog has been studied in detail by Víctor José González Ramallo, as well as his role as cofounder and booster of the Cofradía de la Virgen de Gracia in San Lorenzo de El Escorial from 1946 until his death. For the Virgen de Gracia, whose pilgrimage is declared a National Tourist Interest Festival, Cobos drew numerous works, including the roving cart and, especially, his announcing posters, produced continuously from 1947 to 2001, in total 53 plus one made in 1988 for the canonical coronation of the Virgin.

In 1991 (from January 9 to February 2), when Cobos was already eighty-two, the Tabacalera Group dedicated an exhibition to him, which I visited, in the Patio de la Cultura of Tabacalera, collecting some samples of his work. Unfortunately I did not obtain the catalog for this exhibition, but at least I keep the program that contains some biographical information about the illustrator Antonio Cobos, whose figure and work I have wished to remember in this entry which ends here, not without showing some of the illustrations from the mentioned books.