The University of Valencia presents the 17 December at 19:00, in the Aula Magna of La Nau, the biography of the entrepreneur, collector and patron Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia, a work of more than four hundred pages, coordinated by Professor José Martín, who has had in his edition the participation of the Valencian Department for Culture.
The biography of Martínez Guerricabeitia, published by the University of Valencia (within the Paranimf collection) and the Valencian Department for Education, Culture and Sports, through the Valencian Library, reflects the multifaceted personality of the Valencian entrepreneur who donated to both institutions his pictorial collection and a very extensive library, respectively.
The presentation will be made by José Luis Villacañas, Professor of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the Valencian Library when the donation was made, to whom the Principal of the University of Valencia, Esteban Morcillo; the director of Activities at the Patronat Martínez Guerricabeitia and son of Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia, José Pedro Martínez; and the author of the book, José Martín, will accompany.
Jesús Amor Martínez Guerricabeitia was born in the Valencian town of Villar del Arzobispo in 1922. Entrepreneur, collector and patron, he received early education from his father, a literate anarcho-syndicalist miner who transmitted him the intellectual curiosity that accompanied him throughout his life. “Jesus was deeply marked by his childhood and youth. By his childhood because his father, with a captivating, interesting, cultured personality despite the limitations of the time and social status, in response to the anarchist tradition, he was self-taught, he was a constant reader and he transmitted all that to his children, both to Jesús and his brother José, founder of the legendary publisher Ruedo Iberico”, explains José Martín.
According to the biographer, Jesús was a very good student, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent hard repression truncated his academic expectations. “Prison was for him the university that he never had. During his imprisonment, in his youth, he met other intellectuals, also imprisoned by the dictatorship, such as the Principal Peset, who influenced him in some way. He admired the people who knew, who were cultured, and he did not miss the opportunity to get close to them”, he states.
These influences strengthened the personality of Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia. “He is a person of admirable characteristics for the amazing recovery of the shock that the end of the war meant for him and his family, for his capacity of reinventing himself after being released from prison, the desire to excel himself and fighting for a better life”, Martín describes him.
For these reasons, José Martín wanted to make clear that this biography is a story “of purely human interest”, as he says, on a person “who has managed to fight with tenacity and optimism to overcome the difficulties until improving his status and being able to come back to Spain, where he made his love for books reality through the construction of an extensive library, and art, with and exquisite collection of paintings on social themes”.
Thus, the intensity of the moment takes Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia to improvise, to make decisions that made him to go across the world. During the Spanish post-war period he firstly introduced himself in the leather business, until he emigrated to Colombia in 1951. “Jesús, differently from his brother José who had to run away to France for his political commitment, tried to know other cultures and be independent in different contexts to his own, so he voluntarily travelled to America, where his stay finished building up his personality”, the Professor adds.
There, across the Atlantic Ocean, he devoted to international trade. In 1965 he came back to Valencia and established in the footwear export business from Alicante to the United States. This is the moment in which he started to develop his collector inclination, gathering, on the one hand, an extensive library specialised in political thinking and, secondly, gathering an important collection of paintings with social thematic.
The generosity of Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia and his conviction that culture should be accessible for everybody caused the donation of his legacy, giving it to Valencian public institutions to make it available to younger generations of knowledge and teaching.
In 1989, the family founded the Patronat Martínez Guerricabeitia within the General Foundation of the University of Valencia, in order to promote and disseminate contemporary plastic arts and to increase the artistic heritage of the academic institution, a task that makes possible the Bienal Martínez Guerricabeitia which will have its twelfth edition in 2014. In 1999, the donation of the art collection Martínez Guerricabeitia to the University of Valencia, the most important in its genre in Spain, managed by a public university; in short, a valuable artistic heritage of political and social content took place. In the donation document, the family specified their wish of making those art holdings available to the university community in the first place, and consequently, to make it available to all citizens. In fact, La Nau, the historical building of the Univeristy, has the Sala Martínez Guerricabeitia, a specific space dedicated to this work.
The donation consisted of 129 unique works, including paintings, works on paper and photographs, made by sixty different authors and 274 copies of graphic works by 140 artists. This collection tells the story of contemporary art during the second half of the twentieth century, parallel to the worries of the most committed artists, reflecting in this way the social and ideological repression of the era.
The second donation came four years later. In 2003, he detached from the family library, consisting on 23.000 volumes, which were donated to the Valencian Library of the Valencian Department for Education, Culture and Sports. Bibliophile and collector, he kept 2000 copies of poetry for his personal enjoyment, although in 2009, when the businessman’s wife, Carmen García, died, their son also deposited those copies in the Valencian Library together with his parent’s personal archive.
‘Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia: coleccionista y mecenas'
This is the title of the work coordinated by Professor José Martín Martínez, author of the biographical story that he wanted to focus on the human and familiar aspects of the businessman. With more than four hundred pages, the book was made in collaboration with Jesús Huguet, Facundo Tomás, Juan Manuel Bonet and Vicente Navarro de Luján, who in their texts refer to his artistic and bibliographic legacy.
The book also includes the discourses of the academic ceremony for the Medal of the University of Valencia that the institution awarded him in recognition of his patronage in 1977. Others are those of the Asociación Valenciana de Críticos de Arte (1988), the Consell Valencià de Cultura (2008), the one of Valencia city Council (2010) and the newspaper Levante-EMV (2013).
Now, the biography ‘Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia: coleccionista y mecenas’ (‘Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia: collector and patron’) is a final recognition that rescues the figure of a generous Valencian man, who played a key role within the Valencia anti-Franco movement, patron in that moment of the Communist Party, for not forgetting his activity, his social, political and cultural commitment, to forever remember his name and everything he made with a fighter’s strength and the inventiveness of a born entrepreneur.
Last update: 17 de december de 2013 07:30.
News release
