Gil Cuatrecasas    

Gil’s benign negligence of paying bills and other “trivial activities” of daily life was overshadowed by his customary good humor and affection.  We simply attributed his neglect to his artistic temperament — and never lectured him.  The fact is that Gil never sought material things. Rather, he was deeply immersed in serious literary and intellectual pursuits, as exhibited by his extensive collection of books on Eastern and Western religions, literature, poetry and philosophy — all with copious marginalia.  His unquenchable thirst for knowledge had since about 1979 apparently substituted for the lack of a painting studio.
     
Sadly, after having battled prostate cancer for over eight years, Gil died in January of 2004.  Fortunately, he spent the last year of his life in a retirement home with excellent medical and nursing care where he also made close friends who kept him in good spirits to the end.    
A few months after Gil’s death, my wife, Carol, and I went to Security Storage in Washington, D.C. to see just what it was that we had helped Gil store there those many years ago. We found two rooms.  One had many familiar framed and stretched paintings created by Gil during the early 1960s. The second room had well over one hundred rolls of canvases stacked vertically, including those from Torino which I had transferred there in 1972.  Despite the tragic loss of hundreds of his paintings in a flood in Houston in 1976, the remaining number seemed quite abundant.
 Due to the immense size and weight of the rolls, some eighty to one hundred pounds each, it was quite difficult to view the paintings.  This was remedied with the help of four workers who constructed a large viewing platform using wooden horses and sheets of plywood on the large, hot attic floor of Security Storage. Each roll was opened on this platform for viewing, and then stacked on the floor before it was re-rolled. By the third roll we were stunned by the stylistic differences of the paintings compared to those painted in the 1960s.  Roll after roll, we were dazzled by their size, color, and beauty.  Every painting was unique and we were overcome by emotion while making these exciting discoveries.   

I immediately decided that this body of work had to be preserved.  I would apply all my energy and resources to help bring Gil’s collection to public view, with the conviction that by doing so the art world would surely recognize his creative genius.  These paintings had been sitting in darkness and silence for over forty years, and it was astonishing that until this time, only the artist had seen them.

I knew that the path forward would be especially difficult and expensive due to the cumbersome size and weight of the paintings. We needed to carefully catalog and document every painting with data and photographic images. While we were at Security Storage that week I took digital photos of each painting.  Carol kept a notebook with the roll numbers, painting numbers, dimensions, dates, physical conditions, and subjective descriptions.  With such huge canvases, and the limited space, only photographic approximations were possible. I stood on top of a stepladder, steadying myself by pushing my head against the wooden ceiling and looking down at the platform with my small digital camera.  

We were exhausted after six days, although we had documented only one-third of the rolls. We decided to highlight only the Torino-era paintings since these were clearly the culmination of Gil’s creative expression, and because they were so different from his previous work.  Some months later, Carol and I returned for another strenuous ten days to finish our photo-documentation of what we called, “The Cuatrecasas Treasure: The Torino Collection.”

The next step was to obtain professional photography (4 x 5 or 8 x 10 transparencies), another complex and expensive task.  I spent three days in the hot Security Storage attic preparing a large wall set-up for pinning up the large paintings.  An expert art photographer from New York came by train and spent four long days to photograph about one hundred of them.  I also sent thirty rolled canvases to a storage room near our home in San Diego, and later had them shot by a highly regarded art photographer in Los Angeles.
    
Next, I secured professional high definition scans (20-30 megabytes) of all the transparencies.  After two years, I finally had the materials for assembling portfolios on CDs, presentation portfolios of 5 x 7 photos mounted on special white cardboard sheets, plus Gil’s curriculum vitae and biosketch. I sent these to many museums and galleries, proposing possible exhibitions of Gil’s work. The Spanish Ambassador and the Cultural Attaché in Washington offered to work closely to support any museum showing interest.     
    
After finding many institutional impasses in my one-man attempt to reintroduce Gil to the art world, I decided to create a book solely for family and friends as a permanent documentation of Gil’s magnificent paintings. The book, Gil Cuatrecasas, The Torino Collection (1970-1976), An Undiscovered Treasure (San Diego: Jerry Anderson, Publisher), was issued in March, 2013.  It contains a biography and more than 200 full-page illustrations with descriptions.  It was enthusiastically received.
    
In late 2013, I read in The New York Times about the remarkable and dramatic posthumous discovery of the Armenian-American artist, Arthur Pinajian.  The analogies of Pinajian to Gil were eerie.  The article spoke of the highly respected art historian, Peter Hastings Falk, who had been closely involved in Pinajian’s discovery.  I studied Falk’s background and liked his commentaries regarding the importance of discovering unrecognized “masters,” particularly posthumous ones.  I was especially intrigued by his criteria in evaluating such artists, based on the intrinsic beauty and novelty of their art, rather than on name recognitions and traditional connections to galleries and museums.
    

I sent a long email about Gil to art historian Peter Hastings Falk, on the assumption that he and his group in NY knew quite a lot regarding discovering unrecognized “Masters”, given the very visible descriptions in the public press of his association with the re-discovery of the diseased Hungarian-American artist Pinajian. He responded positively, at which point I sent him a long e-mail describing Gil’s history, and I sent him a copy of the extensive book I had just published about Gil, which had about 220 full-page color photos of Gil’s paintings. Although he was very intrigued, before getting further involved he had to get the input and support of the expert members of his Art Advisory Board to whom he had sent electronic images of my book on Gil. 

 

Falk visited me in San Diego for a firsthand look at some of the paintings displayed in our large home, in addition to three or four that I had brought out from storage for his detailed examination.  He note the unusual style and technique, and he was intrigued by the complex additive and subtractive applications.  He felt Gil’s work was truly unique.

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By coincidence, and before connecting with Falk, in early 2014 I had decided to transfer for documentation the remaining still-unphotographed rolls from storage I had transferred from D.C. to San Diego (about 200 paintings).  The complete photo-documentation involved particularly sophisticated technology ad Herculean efforts by the expert digital photographer, Mark O’Connell of Pixel 2 Editions, given that many of the canvases were over 18 feet long.

A few weeks later, Falk visited me in San Diego for a firsthand look at some of Gil’s paintings hanging in our home, plus three rolls that I retrieved from storage.   He examined each painting closely, noting their unusual style and technique.  He was amazed, puzzled, and intrigued by Gil’s complex additive and subtractive painting application.  He opined that Gil’s work was truly unique. Falk’s visit was a special opportunity to develop mutual respect, and to begin to develop a strategy for introducing this lost master to the world.
    

by Pedro Cuatrecasas, M.D.