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ARTIST:  Eduardo Benito was a Spanish fashion illustrator and painter, noted for his Vogue covers of the 1920s and 1930s.

He studied at the Mignon studio, and later trained under Daniel Vierge. In 1912 he moved to Paris, he later spent 15 years painting Vogue covers. Among Benito's subjects as a portrait painter were Alfonso XIII of Spain, Paul Poiret, and the Chinese Royal family. Also in 1912, he won a scholarship to study at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

Eduardo García Benito was born in Valladolid, Spain in 1891.  He would become one of the most recognized painters for his contribution to magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, and has since been recognized as the Spanish artist most representative of Art Deco.

His journey in art began with the painter Mignon at the School of Fine Arts in Valladolid, and later, continued at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. In 1912, at the young age of 19, Benito — the name with which he would later gain fame — received a scholarship from the Valladolid City Council in Paris to study at the Ecolé des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he would rub elbows with the greats of his time such as Modigliani, Picasso, Juan Gris, Gargallo and José Dunyach.

Paris in the twenties was an oasis for artists and writers; an ideal place to get inspired and write wonderful texts like Hemingway or paint insatiably like Picasso. It’s storefronts were the best place in the world to appreciate exclusive new designs and fashion began to flourish and shine on those streets as brilliantly as the moon above. This was the Paris in which Benito gradually began to appear among the highest sphere of artists thanks to his unmatched talent with the brush.

The trends in which he sought inspiration while finding his own style were very diverse, from Fauvism (whose main objective was to highlight the importance of color in each work), Cubism (characterized by the innovation of geometric shapes in artistic compositions) and Futurism (focused on the plasticity of dynamism and movement); without forgetting Expressionism (which took intensity as the central axis in the expression of feelings), until finally reaching Art Deco — a style for which he remains highly renowned to this day. Jean Cocteau said that Benito’s art responded to a “cube-futurism-expressive”.

The characters that most influenced Benito were Pablo Picasso, with the use of geometric figures in his characteristic works of Cubism; Amadeo Modigliani, through his portraits of the slender women with whom he established close friendships with while living in Paris; and finally the Bracusi sculptures.

But what is Art Deco? It’s an artistic style that developed as the world was going through one of its most complicated moments — the transition between both world wars. It started in Paris and crossed the Atlantic to reach Hollywood, where is was coined “the style of the stars,” and managed to make all arts (decorative, graphic, architecture, jewelry, sculpture, painting, cinema) come together in a common point. It took small influences from the art movements that preceded it and is characterized by a discourse that spoke of progress, elegance and exaggeration. It is recognized mainly by its simple geometric shapes in contrast with rich ornamentation and decoration.

In 1918, Benito began to hold exhibitions of his work in Parisian venues such as the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and the Salon d’Automne. A year later during another of his exhibitions at the Sauvage Gallery, he had a stroke of luck that would change his life forever. He meet designer Paul Poiret, who put him in contact with Condé Nast, thanks to which he later collaborated in Vogue and Vanity Fair making fashion illustrations. In addition, in 1920 the portrait he painted of the King of Spain Alfonso XIII, was part of the Antwerp International Exposition.

Continuing his success, in 1921 he was named a member of the Paris Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, and was often seen working on its jury of admissions. That same year he painted several portraits, including of Monsieur et Madame Paul Poiret, the poet Maurice Rostand, and the Princess Nyota Inyoka.

Two years later, in 1923, he began to move between Paris and New York, in the latter of which he did numerous jobs for the actress Gloria Swanson and began his journey into the field of fashion working for Condé Nast.

The main elements that characterize his work are the marked use of geometric figures and the representation of the stylized female figure. As an illustrator, he made the covers of significant fashion magazines such as La Gazette du Bon Ton, Le Gout du Jour, L´Homme Elegante, Vanity Fair and Vogue. He earned so much recognition with his work that he became appointed “Illustrator In Chief” at Vogue and Vanity Fair.

While in New York, he also held exhibitions in numerous art galleries such as the Wildenstein Gallery in 1924 and in 1933. In 1935, he received the Medal of Honor from the Art Directors Club in New York, and in 1974, the United States Congress congratulated García Benito for the cultural work he carried out in the country.

However, after World War II, photographers began to displace graphic artists and it was when Benito decided to end his 20-year stint in Vogue and Paris.

He returned to Valladolid in 1962 and became a professor at of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the Immaculate Conception. It was during this period that he began to conceptualize a project that would later be known as his “frustrated dream, ”  in which he dreamed of converting the old Church of the Passion into a museum with his name to house a large part of his artistic work. He was consumed with the idea of ??leaving a legacy and indelible mark on his homeland through this building. He drew plans for the building in details, even identifying the location for each of the paintings he wanted to put in the building.

He died at the age of ninety on Tuesday, December 1, 1981, in Valladolid — the land where he was born.

In May 2011, his work was remembered in the Municipal Exhibition Hall of the Passion Museum of Valladolid, with a sample of his most representative works made up of sixty paintings provided by the Municipal Culture Foundation of the Valladolid City Council. The mayor of the City of Javier León de la Riva said that the main purpose of this event was to rediscover the most influential Spanish Art Deco artist of the 20th century.

Without a doubt, Eduardo García Benito transcended his time and will be remembered for years to come by art lovers thanks to the amazing quality of the work he left behind. From his iconic covers for renowned fashion magazines and his countless achievements during the time of the Belle Époque.

The Art Deco style, which originated in France just before World War I, had an important impact on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The most famous examples are the skyscrapers of New York City including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. It combined modern aesthetics, fine craftsmanship and expensive materials, and became the symbol of luxury and modernity. While rarely used in residences, it was frequently used for office buildings, government buildings, train stations, movie theaters, diners and department stores. It also was frequently used in furniture, and in the design of automobiles, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as toasters and radio sets. In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, it featured prominently in the architecture of the immense public works projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. The style competed throughout the period with the modernist architecture, and came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the beginning of World War II. The style was rediscovered in the 1960s, and many of the original buildings have been restored and are now historical landmarks.

The Art Deco style had been born in Paris, but no buildings were permitted in that city which were higher than Notre Dame Cathedral (with the sole exception of the Eiffel Tower). As a result, the United States soon took the lead in building tall buildings. The first skyscrapers had been built in Chicago in the 1880s in the Beaux-Arts or neoclassical style. In the 1920s, New York architects used the new Art Deco style to build the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. The Empire State building was the tallest building in the world for forty years.

The decoration of the interior and exterior of the skyscrapers was classic Art Deco, with geometric shapes and zigzag patterns. The Chrysler Building, by William Van Alen (1928–30), updated the traditional gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals with sculptures on the building corners in the shape of Chrysler radiator ornaments.

Another major landmark of the style was the RCA Victor Building (now the General Electric Building), by John Walter Cross. It was covered from top to bottom with zig-zags and geometric patterns, and had a highly ornamental crown with geometric spires and lightning bolts of stone. The exterior featured bas-relief sculptures by Leo Friedlander and Lee Lawrie, and a mosaic by Barry Faulkner that required more than a million pieces of enamel and glass.

While the skyscraper Art Deco style was mostly used for corporate office buildings, it also became popular for government buildings, since all city offices could be contained in one building on a minimal amount of land. The city halls of Los Angeles, California and Buffalo, New York were built in the style, as well as the new capital building of the State of Louisiana.

There was no specific Art Deco style of painting in the United States, though paintings were often used as decoration, especially in government buildings and office buildings. In the 1932 the Public Works of Art Project was created to give work to artists unemployed because the Great Depression. In a year, it commissioned more than fifteen thousand works of art. It was succeeded in 1935 by the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. prominent American artists were commissioned by the Federal Art Project to paint murals in government buildings, hospitals, airports, schools and universities. Some the America's most famous artists, including Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Maxine Albro took part in the program. The celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera also took part in the program, painting a mural. The paintings were in a variety of styles, including regionalism, social realism, and American scenic painting.

A few murals were also commissioned for Art Deco skyscrapers, notably Rockefeller Center in New York. Two murals were commissioned for the lobby, one by John Steuart Curry and another by Diego Rivera. The owners of the building, the Rockefeller family, discovered that Rivera, a Communist, had slipped an image of Lenin into a crowd in the painting, and had it destroyed. The mural was replaced with another by the Spanish artist José Maria Sert.

The Art Deco style appeared early in the graphic arts, in the years just before World War I. It appeared in Paris in the posters and the costume designs of Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes, and in the catalogs of the fashion designers Paul Poiret. The illustrations of Georges Barbier, and Georges Lepape and the images in the fashion magazine La Gazette du bon ton perfectly captured the elegance and sensuality of the style. In the 1920s, the look changed; the fashions stressed were more casual, sportive and daring, with the woman models usually smoking cigarettes. American fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar quickly picked up the new style and popularized it in the United States. It also influenced the work of American book illustrators such as Rockwell Kent.

In the 1930s a new genre of posters appeared in the United States during the Great Depression. The Federal Art Project hired American artists to create posters to promote tourism and cultural events.