Julio de Diego (1900 – 1979)

Heavenly Phenomena, 1939 

Oil on board

27.5 x 21.25 inches

42.25 x 34.25 inches framed

Signed and dated lower left

Provenance:

Private collection, Chicago, IL, 1996-present

Exhibition history: 

Bonestell Gallery, New York, May, 1940

Museum of Modern Art, 1943 (label verso)

Born in Madrid in 1900, Julio De Diego left home at the age of 15 to apprentice as a scene painter for theaters. After service in the Spanish army, including six months fighting in North Africa, De Diego traveled to Paris and Rome to study art. He also appeared as an extra in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. De Diego emigrated to the United States in 1924. He lived in New York for two years, then went to Chicago, where he remained until 1942. At first, he earned a living as a magazine illustrator, decorative painter, and graphic designer. By the early 1930s, he began to show regularly at the Art Institute of Chicago, appearing at thirty-two annual exhibitions of Chicago Artists, American artists, and watercolorists, between 1931 and 1947. De Diego was employed by the easel division of the Illinois Art Project during the mid-1930s. He traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1939, becoming close friends with Carlos Merida. De Diego was deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War, and many of his works reflect the conflict that presaged the Second World War. His works Meditation over Inexplicable Logic seems to be a kind of preparation for De Diego’s self-portrait in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, titled The Perplexity of What To Do (1940). Both feature isolated, brooding figures lost in their inability to respond to events. De Diego left Chicago in 1942, but continued to exhibit his work at major institutions. A 1946 Life magazine article described him spending time “cooking aromatic Spanish dishes and reading works of Spanish mystical philosophers and poets. He smokes cigarettes incessantly and dresses flamboyantly, affecting cerise mufflers and jangling bracelets.”

In 1946 he held a Modern Handmade Jewelry exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and two years later remarried Gypsy Rose Lee, becoming her third husband. Together they traveled with the Royal American Shows where Gypsy worked as a performer while her husband created murals. Three years later they divorced in Reno, Nevada, and he settled in California. After their separation and divorce in the mid-1950s, De Diego lived for a time in New York at the Chelsea Hotel, a haunt of artists, musicians, and poets. During World War II he supported the American Artists’ Congress which was fighting censorship in Germany and Italy and before it was in opposition against Francisco Franco. After the war he taught at the University of Denver and the Artist Equity Workshop. Later on he settled in Sarasota, Florida where he died on August 22, 1979. De Diego’s work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum, among other public and private collections. References: “Julio De Diego: He Paints Weird War and Peace.” Life Magazine, March 11, 1946. De Diego, Julio. Pamphlet File P-07866. Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago.