Jose Ortega Museo e Casa

He was representative of the social realism of the Spanish Civil War and one of the group members "Estampa popular", of which he was also the founder. At thirteen he moved to Madrid where he began to make his first paintings and took part in anti-Francoist circles, thus linking his later experiences and his work to a strong political and civil commitment. At the age of 26 he was convicted of crimes of opinion, and after his prison in 1952 his first cycle of woodcuts was published. In the early sixties began his long exile and moved to Paris, where he was awarded by the International Congress of Art Critics of Verucchio directed by Giulio Carlo Argan the gold medal for his action to fight for freedom. In 1964 Antonello Trombadori organized his first solo exhibition in Italy at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome, followed by those of 1968 and 1974. In the following years he made numerous exhibitions in Philadelphia, Toronto, Saint Louis, Zurich, Turin and Brussels. In 1969 he made the twenty etchings of the great suite of the Segadores, inspired by the sufferings of the workers of the earth. In 1971 he worked on the Ortega ± Dürer cycle, sixty engravings about the Spanish Civil War theme presented at the Nuremberg Museum and then exhibited in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

He moved to Matera in 1973, where he had his workshop in the headquarters of the cultural circle La Scaletta in the Sassi, experimenting with new techniques in sculpting bas-reliefs and using papier-mâché in an innovative way; here he realized one of his most important pictorial cycles, Death and Birth of the Innocents, presented at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. He gave many of his works as a gift to the city of Matera, to which he was deeply attached. In 1976, after sixteen years of exile, he was granted permission to return freely to Spain, and thus he was able to exhibit his works in Madrid, Valencia and Bilbao, where he exhibited in particular the great series of bas-reliefs realized in Matera; he left Spain again in 1980 to return to Italy, where he continued an intense exhibition activity, settling in the small town of Bosco, in the province of Salerno. He declared that he had chosen this place because he reminded him of his beloved Spain; he himself said:

"I'm fine with you, because here I found anguish and misery that are those of my people. Because the colors are those of my land. I stayed because the skin of the laborers is dark and dry, like that of the Spanish peasants. »

He managed to buy a house (still open today) where, sitting in the front garden, he devoted himself to painting landscapes and still lifes. His house is a real museum, where you can still admire paintings that decorate it both internally and externally. He earned the esteem and affection of all in a short time: he is remembered as a solitary and thoughtful man, but at the same time generous and thoughtful.

"Here I came to build a piece of freedom. Working in these lands means to observe and learn constantly, to then bring with us something truly pure and genuine that is worth having assimilated. There are moments in the life of peoples, in which artists feel that an art with a revolutionary content is a necessity. So no more art for art. We poets, musicians, painters, we creators of art ... against those who preach disengagement and evasion ... we feel that the people need art forms that call to union to restore freedom and democracy to the country. »

At the entrance of the village you can admire its famous majolicas that depict the revolutionary revolutionary uprisings of 1828 that took place in Bosco.