Miguel Hernandez Spanish nationality Born in Avila in 1893 Dies in Paris on January 5th, 1957

Originally from a farming family, Miguel's dream is to run a coffee plantation in Brazil. He emigrates at the age of nineteen, becomes an agricultural worker in a hacienda, then a cereal vendor, a pastry-cook and, for a while, the right hand of a countess. He finally settles in Rio as a cook before joining a group of revolutionaries.

After his return to Europe he works for an anarchic paper in Lisbon. He is arrested by the police and forced to leave Portugal and return to Spain. He fights the war in Morocco and returns to Madrid, where he becomes first a barber and finally an agent for a publishing house. As a strong anarchist and antimilitarist militant he rebels against the dictatorships of Franco and Stalin. He is imprisoned several times. During the 1936 Civil War he has five thousand men under his command. In 1938, he gets married and escapes from Spain. He is held in a refugee camp in the South of France. To save his wife from these hard times he sends her back to Spain; they will never see each other again. At the end of the war, he settles in Paris with no income, lives in misery, but continues his political combat. He manages the newspaper "Espana Libre" and devotes the rest of his time to an artistic career. His works are very moving, haunted by images from his country, from the farming and working class world, mixed with strange figures caught in agonizing spirals.

Hernandez's paintings are most poignant when he represents women surrounded by doves: a somber and poetic beauty, the image of the lost love that will haunt him until his death. Always fighting the problems of society, this cultured man has created a very personal body of work. It seems as if Miguel Hernandez, chronicler of our times, had lived with one foot on our side of the world, and with the other one in his own private one.

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