A Major Exhibition and a Dénouement
By the mid 1970s a stream of artists, poets, art critics, journalists, and gallerists visited Cuatrecasas’s studio in Torino to view his then quite large body of work. Perhaps the most famous and frequent visitor was the Italian art publisher and collector, Umberto Allemandi, who became a champion of the artist. “His total, obsessive devotion to painting impressed me deeply,” he wrote. “He came preceded by his fame of having left each of his studios, from Washington to Barcelona, choking with canvases.”

Allemandi and others who saw the collection produced in Torino during that seven-year period were profoundly moved and urged Cuatrecasas, albeit unsuccessfully, to exhibit. He wanted nothing to do with galleries or anything that distracted him from his painting. Instead, he remained compulsively focused and prolific, covering the vast floors of the Torino home with hundreds of large canvases from eight to twenty-two feet long. A partial explanation for his recalcitrance could be discovered in his bookcase. Most of the books were concerned with Far Eastern religions and philosophies such as Zen and Taoism. Others were about the occult and psychoanalysis. The titles reveal an introspective personality, a philosopher reticent to explain the origin and meaning of his paintings. He was also frugal in every aspect of his life — except when it came to the quality of his painting materials. Acrylics were a very large part of his budget, and he was very happy that he could buy top quality acrylics in Italy that cost less than those in the United States. Because he lived in Torino, it is most likely that he purchased his acrylics just 75 miles to the east in Milan where the Maimeri family produced their famous Brera brand, respected as among the finest pigments available worldwide. Their pigments are touted for their strength, elasticity, and color-fastness, drying to a permanent egg sheen finish. In fact, he agreed to sell three large canvases to Allemandi only because the transactions allowed him to purchase more pigments.

In 1973 Cuatrecasas returned to America to visit his sister in Syracuse, New York. There he reconnected with James Harithas, then the Director of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. When Cuatrecasas showed him photographs of the body of paintings in the Torino series Harithas counted himself among the stunned. Two years later, when he was named the new Director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston he invited Cuatrecasas to a solo exhibition intended to travel to other museums. Known as a provocateur, Harithas was hired to bring new energy into Houston’s art scene. “My mission was to bring to Houston first class works by important artists even if those artists were young and lacking recognition. Cuatrecasas’s paintings were beyond the taste of the moment. I showed Julian Schnabel at about the same time, years before he became famous in New York. Turned out that everyone in Houston hated me for it — but I didn’t care.”3

Harithas selected a collection of the large paintings and in 1976 had them shipped to the museum. Cuatrecasas would soon return to Houston to work with a team in unrolling the large canvases and fixing them upon their stretchers. But on June 15th — just two weeks before the exhibition was to open — Houston was suddenly hit with a tropical storm that dumped more than ten inches of rain in six hours. It was the worst flooding disaster in the city’s history, drowning eight people. Eight feet of water flooded the museum’s basement. Paintings by Josef Albers, Max Ernst, and Norman Bluhm and many others were destroyed. So were about 200 canvases and as many works on paper by Cuatrecasas. Naturally, the exhibition was cancelled.3

Cuatrecasas was understandably quite distraught and his despondency bordered on depression. Not only had he failed to recover proper compensation from the insurance companies but he had lost a major exhibition that would have reintroduced him to the art world. Harithas later observed, “Cuatrecasas would have become famous had he only gone to New York. I told him so, but he just seemed to shrug it off.”

Instead, Cuatrecasas returned to his aunt’s apartment in Barcelona as she had retired and sold the Torino villa. His brother recalled, “Within a few months, amazingly, his artistic restlessness and drive to paint again raised his spirits enough to lead him to take some bold action. With modest financial help from the family he bought a very large 200-year old stone farmhouse just outside of Barcelona. He worked immediately with rare zest with an architect and a builder to design exactly what he wanted: an enormous live-in studio where he could resume his life’s work. This was his new dream. The renovation began and moved along well for two years. He visited and managed the progress daily, driving his beloved old yellow Ford Pinto wagon he had shipped from Washington, D.C. Progress began to slow down in the third year of this complex process because of costs, construction complexities, and the frequent absence of the builder. Gil persisted with continual phone calls and visits, but to no avail. Finally, after nearly four years of increasing frustrations, all work stopped and Gil had little choice but to give up. The task failed. He just abandoned the farmhouse, never to see it again. His Pinto sat untouched in a garage for ten years. His last dream was shattered. This was a calamity that may have been his major career-ending event. He was now forever destined not to have a proper studio again.”4