San Sebastián (EFE).- Amable Arias, the artist who portrayed behind the scenes the actors, musicians and dancers who populated the Teatro Principal in San Sebastián in the 50s, captured in his drawings and watercolors vedettes, comedians, tailors and ushers that from today until May 28 are exhibited at the San Telmo Museum in the Gipuzkoan capital.
The “Teatro Principal” series is part of the donation of 105 drawings and watercolors that the companion of Amable Arias (1927-1984), Maru Rizo, made to the San Telmo Museum last year, of which 79 are now exhibited along with 29 photographs by dedicated artists.
a youth locked up
Amable Arias arrived in San Sebastián from Bembibre (León) in 1942 six years after the accident that destroyed his pelvis, forcing him to depend on crutches for the rest of his life, and led him to spend his youth confined at home.
After the abandonment of her husband, an abusive man who showed animosity towards her son, the mother of Amable Arias began working in 1951 in the cloakroom of the Teatro Principal. While she helps her with some tasks, the young man had the opportunity to see up close the artists who take the stage.
“I went to the stage because the world behind the scenes attracted me: actresses, actors, comedians, singers, dancers, girls and a very long range of fantasy lights,” Arias himself collects in one of the four unpublished writings about his experiences. which is included in the exhibition catalogue.
Between 1955 and 1959 Arias, whose academic training goes back to the painting classes he had received from Ascensio Martiarena, produced artists’ drawings and watercolors.
Show business portraits
They are portraits “without physiological traits” but that reveal “an exceptional ability to capture attitudes and gestures”, pointed out the curator of the exhibition, Miguel Lertxundi, at the presentation of the sample.
“The one at the Teatro Principal is a foundational series by Arias” in which one begins to glimpse what his work will be, has pointed out Lertxundi, who believes that the experience and closeness to the world of theater provided the creator with the critical spirit that imbued his works later.
In those years, the Teatro Principal offered a heterogeneous program that included cinema, opera, theater, classical dance and Spanish dance, but the “queen of shows was the magazine”, Lertxundi pointed out.
The magazine years
“A very elastic genre that included different numbers in which the undisputed star was the vedette, women full of sensuality and eroticism”, he stated.
The first of the four parts in which the exhibition is distributed is focused on them, which includes photos dedicated to Amable Arias and portraits of Lina Morgan when she represented San Sebastián in 1957 “Mujeres o diosas” and of Queta Claver.
The pieces are made on low-quality paper, since Amable Arias did not have the resources to buy better materials and reserved good paper for black ink drawings, according to the author himself in the writings included in the catalogue.
The “Actors and comedians” section, which includes the portraits that Arias made of Sáenz de Heredia, Antonio Casal and other artists of the time, gives way to a section dedicated to comedians such as Cassen and dedicated photos of stars such as Imperio Argentina and Antonio Machin. .
The exhibition closes with a series dedicated to the Teatro Principal, which includes watercolors by ushers such as Ana Mari Vidaurre, who had a protective attitude towards Amable Arias, tailors and other professions.
A note on the orchestra pit “forgetting perspective” is one of the pieces in which the character that Amable Arias developed in his work in the 1960s is “most recognizable”, Lertxundi has assured.