Pedro Gros or Pedro Gross (January 26, 1904 - January 31, 1998) was a Spanish painter and sculptor of contemporary impressionist symbolism. He was also a jeweler, an actor, and a businessman. He created the first doll brand in Spain (known as El Mago Gros in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s) and worked as a professor of fine arts, toys and crafts in the Americas.
First years
The work of Pedro Gross was greatly influenced by a difficult personal life that started in childhood. He did not know his father and lost his mother, Adela Gros (dressmaker and jeweler) to breast cancer when he was 10 years old. He found himself in the midst of deep poverty, with two younger siblings to care for.
In 1921, in the stead of his brother Antonio, he enlisted in the army to go to the front lines of the Rif War. In the Battle of the Rif in Tetouan, he witnessed the atrocities committed during the conflict. It was there that he first showed his artistic talent by making pencil portraits of the soldiers and commanders. He became the sketch artist of the Rif campaign.
On his return to Spain, he worked for the ABC newspaper and became close friends with Antonio Mingote, from the Luca de Tena family. In so doing he entered the circle of artists of the Café Varela.
He married Josefina Agramunt and they had their first child who died tragically in a domestic accident. This event marked him forever.
In 1930, he held his first exhibition of portraits in the Heraldo Salon in Madrid, with the sculptor Fernando Boada. The ease, strength and expressiveness of his portraits stood out. This was one of the early steps in his path to creating the first doll brand in Spain: Gros. The first dolls were characters from Salvador Bartolozzi and Mingote stories.
His second daughter Delia (Dalilah) was born with Josefina Agramunt, who was a famous child prodigy of Spanish dance, who converted to Arabic dance and was the most important artist of the genre in the 1960s and 1970s.
When the civil war broke out in Spain, the artist's studio and factory were burned down due to the refusal of the republican and nationalist sides to manufacture thousands of satirical and propaganda dolls for children.
Awards in Spain
In 1940s and 1950s in Spain, Pedro was one of the personalities of the artistic and bohemian life of Madrid. Winner of medals of honor from the Autumn salons in consecutive years from 1947 to 1950 with the works: La Maja del Capote, Doña Blanca de los Ríos, Los Monaguillos and Sendas Obstinada.
Trilogy
Formed by three large-format canvases, the first, The Tree of Poets, 1957, (Currently located in the History Museum of Madrid) is a cinemascope-format oil canvas. It is an allegory for love and reunion, despite the horrors, wounds and hatred sown in the Spanish civil war. The allegory shows love as a creative, regenerating universal force, represents the hope of peace and equality and was the farewell to Spain, capturing 79 intellectuals, women and men of the time, among which are the poets of the gathering "Verses with skirts" of the Café Varela on Preciados street, to which he pays tribute.
With this first work, he conceives the idea of traveling through the Americas, making a pilgrimage with the second work and the centerpiece of the trilogy:
Inferno of the World
1958 Beirut -1991 Medellín. Perhaps one of the largest space-time formats in the history of pictorial art, a colossal nomadic mural that for 33 years he was painting and exhibiting continuously, traveling through the United States, South America and Central America. It is a singular piece of contemporary symbolism that represents hatred as a human scourge, narrating its horrors and miseries in the history of humanity, cryptically creating a retrospective and prospective of its characters and world events, through a colossal octopus. which symbolizes the 8 deadly sins (According to Gross, the eighth sin is stupidity). In the painting he defends the need for change, in the face of the evils that will increasingly haunt the planet: devastation and climate change, helpless and exploited children, intolerance, political corruption, nationalisms, populisms, automation...
The trilogy closes with the play: A New Man, 1990. It is an allegory of the encounter in greed, performed at the Yalta Conference after defeating the aberrant Nazi regime. On the canvas they represent the elements that gave birth to the so-called new order and the cold war between the new powers after the conflict.