Esteban Vicente; Abstract Expressionist Painter

Esteban Vicente, the Spanish painter who was one of the last active members of the New York school of Abstract Expressionist artists, has died.

Vicente died Wednesday at his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. He was 97.

Described by one critic as “an outspoken advocate of purity and discipline in painting,” Vicente was a master of both the analytic-Cubist collage (in paper on either board or canvas) and the Abstract Expressionist gesture (splashed in paint on canvas).

Born in the Spanish town of Turegano, Vicente studied sculpting but turned to figurative painting as a young man. He moved to Paris in the late 1920s, where he associated with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst and earned a living working on theater sets for the Folies Bergere and by retouching photographs.

He moved to New York in the mid-1930s, established himself as a portrait painter and turned to abstraction in the 1950s.

Some of his finest works include large collage paintings that he produced from the mid-1940s through the mid-1980s.

“He thinks of collage as a more intimate form of painting,” said Elizabeth Frank, who wrote a monograph on Vicente in the mid-1990s. “Never monumental in a heroic sense, it is a way of speaking to you alone, a synthesis of Spanish art and 20th-century modernism.”

His body of work also includes stain paintings that he began making in the 1960s. “Color is central to the moods and emotions of his work,” a Times reviewer noted in 1992.

In an interview with an East Hampton, N.Y., newspaper years ago, Vicente described his paintings as “interior landscapes, in a sense an inner accumulation of my visual experiences, something that comes from inside of me but is related to the outside.”

Vicente was also active in the academic community, teaching at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Yale and New York University.

In 1998, the Spanish government opened the Esteban Vicente Contemporary Art Museum in Segovia. The permanent collection of 142 works is housed in the newly renovated 15th-century Palace of Don Enrique IV.

Vicente’s work is also represented in most of the major art museums in the United States.

In an interview with the Times years ago, Vicente, who was working up until the time of his death, noted that painting is a lifelong endeavor.

“A lawyer or a businessman, they retire,” he said. “A poet or a painter, you are forever, until you die.”