Spring

A sense of being part of art’s long tradition may seem odd for an artist who spent more than half of his career eliminating imagery from his canvases. But Vicente felt strongly connected to the painterly tradition of Goya, Velázquez, and other masters of his birth country. In Spring thin layers of color are brushed and sprayed to create shapes that hover in space. The painting seems less a flat plane than an environment of pink, red, and orange “clouds” that give the sense of colored air. “I didn’t understand color really until very late,” he said. “To me color is one thing: light.”

Modern Masters: Midcentury Abstraction from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2008