Federico Armando Beltran Masses (1885–1949); Spanish painter born in Guaira de la Melena, Cuba. Beltran Masses was renowned as a master of color and the psychological portrait, as well as a painter of seductive images of women. Born in Cuba, where his mother’s family had lived for nearly two centuries, his family returned to Spain to live in Barcelona, when he was 7 years old - the painter’s Spanish heritage would influence his oeuvre deeply while he sometimes referenced the tropical exoticism of Cuba in the settings for some of his subjects. His paintings are rich with musical and poetic references influenced by ‘Greek mythology, orphic mysteries and fantasies of Asia, where we are led by Gustave Moreau’ remarked Louis Vauxcelles. ....An early fascination with Symbolism and ‘the Ancients’ manifest in paintings such as Lackmy and Canción de Bilitis, while his dark paintings of eroticized women, languorously posed in fantastical nocturnal settings set him apart from contemporary artistic trends. His 1915 portrait of a Spanish countess, naked but for a white mantilla, seated between 2 fully clothed companions (La Maja Marquesa), was publicly denounced and had to be retitled. This decided Beltrán’s move to Paris, where he spent most of the next 30 years. Before his departure a solo exhibition of his work in Madrid in 1916 received the accolade of a visit from the Spanish King, Alfonso XIII; this was followed by further successes at the XII Venice Biennale of 1920, where an entire pavilion was dedicated to his work, and several large-scale exhibitions in Paris, New York, Palm Beach and London received enthusiastic reviews. Such was his fame that in 1926 Martha Graham titled a dance at her first public performance in New York Portrait – Beltran Masses; in 1929 the temporary removal from a London exhibition of 2 particularly explicit paintings led to denunciations of censorship but insured an attendance of... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Beltr%C3%A1n_Masses) undefined

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