29 Facts About Lourdes Gomez-Franca

Lourdes Gomez-Franca's work was significant in Miami and Cuban art communities of the later Twentieth Century and covered by many critics and scholars.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca's family was well-established in Cuba and she was raised in Havana's wealthy Vedado neighborhood of stately homes.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca was institutionalized when Lourdes was five, after which she and her older sister were raised by their grandparents.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca started painting as an untrained prodigy by the age of three, focusing mainly on religious themes such as the Madonna and Child for her first years.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca was encouraged by teachers while attending the Escuela de Margot Parraga, the St George's School, and the Merici Academy.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca formally studied painting at the prestigious Academia San Alejandro at the age of 20.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca first became a known and respected artist in Cuba at this time, even championed by leading Cuban art figures such as Victor Manuel and Carlos Enriquez.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca had achieved significant early success and recognition in her home country during its mid-century artistic flourishing.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca then went to Paris in 1957 at the age of 24 and spent several months there.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca studied fine art directly under two leading masters of the time, learning painting from Andre Lhote and etching and engraving from Stanley Hayter.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca was living in the Cite Universite and immersed in the mid-century Parisian art scene.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca was then hospitalized shortly afterwards, her first in a series of mental health hospitalizations throughout her life.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca would revisit her traumatic Paris period several times in later paintings and poems.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca would remain there and continue to paint the rest of her life until her death in 2018.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca painted portraits of the Permuy family and Permuy was a frequent dealer of her artwork for much of her career.

Permuy introduced Lourdes Gomez-Franca to leading Latin American art collectors Marcos and Josefina Pinedo, who would become major collectors of her work.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca became an emphatic supporter of Lourdes after seeing one of her paintings of a cathedral over a fireplace at the home of artist Pablo Cano.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca was active in the period of Gomez Franca's career that included the launch of her last poetry collection, El Nino De Guano.

Cano, thirty years her junior and now better known for his sculptural work, provided the illustrations to each poem in a style that was strongly reminiscent of Lourdes Gomez-Franca' own, reflecting her influence on him as a mentor.

Stylistically, Lourdes Gomez-Franca is known for her vivid use of color, heavy impasto, and flowing, childlike Expressionistic imagery.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca displayed a deliberate lack of realism with her distinct expressionism that occasionally incorporated aspects of Surrealism and Fauvism, such as curving and floating objects, vivid and unnatural use of color, disproportionate size, and so on.

Specifically, Lourdes Gomez-Franca' work has been compared to the works of European artists in these movements, namely Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, and Max Beckmann, as well as prominent Cuban contemporaries of hers such as Victor Manuel and Rene Portocarrero.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca left many of her works untitled and undated, letting them speak for themselves in her typically pure and straightforward manner; when titles are given, they are likewise simple, unpretentious, and directly descriptive.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca usually signed her paintings simply with "Lourdes" and on occasion would leave preliminary sketches on the backside of her canvases, offering a playful glimpse into her creative process.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca won several awards, including Second Prize for oil Painting from the CINTAS Foundation in 1966, Third Prize for oil painting during the 1966 University of Miami Group Exhibition, and First Prize for oil painting in the 1969 Arcadia Exhibition.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca's career was covered extensively by media in both Cuba and the United States, conducted several interviews, and was profiled by El Nuevo Herald and The Palm Beach Post.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca has been praised by leading scholars in Cuban art.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca wrote the foreword for her 1989 book The Thorns Are Green My Friend, a poetry collection written primarily during one of her hospitalizations.

Lourdes Gomez-Franca's work is included in the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum as well as several prominent collections of Cuban art, including the Permuy and Pinedo collections.