LEGACY OF JOSÉ GUERRERO

In addition to the Collection of the Centre, the Guerrero Fund contains the painter’s personal archive and his art library. As part of the José Guerrero Centre’s main aim of dissemination, the documents of the Archive are placed at the disposal of researchers and the general public.

The Guerrero Archive is a valuable resource, not only because of the amount of documents it contains, but also because of their quality and variety. Thanks to the diligence of the artist’s wife, Roxane Pollock, we are now able to view his personal reflections and comments, general and particular opinions, and news of the most important cultural events of the time, all seen, lived and told in the first person. In this sense the Archive represents an interesting collection of material for the history of contemporary art in Spain. It includes all the surviving documentation generated by Guerrero’s professional activity from the 1940s to the early 1990s, as well as personal and family documents, manuscripts, correspondence with artists, institutions, critics and gallery owners, lists of prices, bills, estimates and miscellaneous graphic documentation, such as press dossiers, transparencies, photographs and posters.

The personal library consists of reference and other works on contemporary art, catalogues of exhibitions, fairs and competitions, leaflets, invitations and reviews. As a whole it accounts for the professional, social and cultural activity of one of the landmark Spanish painters of the second half of the 20th century.

The documents composing the José Guerrero Archive were transported in three different shipments from Barcelona and New York in thirty-one large packing cases. In 2009 all the material was exhaustively catalogued and archived in one hundred and six document cases, specially designed for suitable conservation, and classified as described below.