Academy

Gargallo made three terracotta specimens, repertoires.

He also made, with the help of the scorers who collaborated with him, three examples in white marble (one of them in the Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Madrid), repertoires.

Despite the apparently explicit nature of its title, this work can be described as anything but academic, regardless of whether its general characteristics that are most evident at first glance may lead one to think so.

However, if the view is not so simple, one immediately notices the extraordinary modernity of his approach (we could then accept the eventual existence of a modern academicism, but, in any case, the term is unacceptable for any work by Gargallo) and the personal and unsurpassable plastic language applied to its execution, absolutely essentialized, free of any anecdotal concession, rigorous in the anatomical (the back could be contemplated ad aeternam) and fully refined in the formal and expressive aspects.

For this sculpture, Gargallo drew four preliminary notes, then modifying, with respect to the first two, the positions of the arms and legs, and that of the left arm in the case of the last two, which - on both sides of the same support - belong to the collections of the Pablo Gargallo Museum.