The Strong Man

This panel is from the series Camacho’s Wedding, painted by Sert for one of the gala dining rooms in the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.

From the 1930s onwards Sert increasingly focused on the male body and on demonstrations of physical strength. Man in action, engaged in work and effort, would be one of the decorative motifs that he most frequently depicted throughout that decade, primarily in his commissions of a public nature. This interest gave rise to the invention of the titan figure, which he would create some years later for the walls and ceiling of the lobby of the Rockefeller Center in New York and for those of the League of Nations in Geneva. It could be said that the present Strong Man, painted for the Waldorf Astoria (like the figure of the giant that also frequently appears in his private commissions) looks forward to the colossus of later years in a more amenable version that was extremely suitable for private works of a celebratory nature.

Compositionally, Sert is at his most brilliant here in the way that he combines the diagonals of the table legs, the central group of onlookers and the woman’s leg in the foreground with the vertical lines of the curtains, the figure in the top hat and the principal group comprising the strong man and his load. This movement is perfectly balanced by the horizontal lines of the architectural setting.