PART IV
MOROCCO:
ORIENTAL MYSTICISM
 
"From my windows you can see two continents and two seas"
Claudio Bravo about his studio in Tangier
W hen Bravo moved to Tangier in 1972, he returned to the place that had provided him his first glimpse, more than a decade before, of the lands on the other side of the Atlantic.
Bravo says that perhaps Tangier has always been something of a symbol for him—of freedom, of originality—"although I am not very much given to reading symbols into life's experiences, so often we get them wrong. I chose it principally because of the cli­mate and the light. Tangier has a marvelous climate throughout the year. Places like Fez or Marrakesh are too hot in summer and too cold in winter. Tangier has an absolute Mediterranean light. I've always tried to capture a Mediterranean light in my work. Tangier has it—New York, for instance, doesn't. I see that the pictures I paint in New York (those done when I vis­ited that city in the 1960s and 70s or those done in my apartment which I bought there several years ago) have an over-all grey tonality. In the Philippines, where I lived for some six months in 1968, my paint­ings also appeared grey. That was because the light was so strong there. It killed color. I feel more at home with Mediterranean color. In my New York pic­tures I have to exaggerate colors to make up for the ash-like atmosphere there. Yet I paint in all parts of Morocco. The landscape in Morocco is something of a biblical landscape.”
Claudio Bravo and one of his paintings in the estate of Tangier. Image: Massimo Listri, Corbis Images.
THE INSPIRATION OF THE
MOROCCAN CULTURE
In his paintings of Tangier, Bravo seeks to evoke the color and mystery of this African town. The models who pose for him are workers in the house, their friends, the telephone repair man. But he can only get male models in Morocco. “Islamic women will not pose for me. That is one of the reasons why I recently bought apartments in Madrid and New York—to expand the range of types that I paint.” Bravo found his house shortly after arriving in Tangier.

It is in a modest district of the city, away from the center, virtually hidden in a maze of winding streets. It is a large house, built in the 18th century that Bravo restored to its original appearance. It is built on four levels. On the lowest is a narrow pool, a fountain and a pavilion. The principal rooms are on the second level and Bravo's large studio is on the third. When Bravo paints, music is usually playing in his studio. Most often it's opera, usually Verdi, sometimes Mozart. The theatrical sensibility of opera has always been important to Bravo who, as a young man, spent a great deal of time working in the theatre. At the end of it is a terrace from which there is an ample view of both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as well as the Spanish coast, the Rock of Gibraltar and the surrounding portions of the African coast. ("From my windows you can see two continents and two seas.") The walls of the house are thick. Each room is reached by passing through an archway or through carved wooden doors. The house is built on a hill on which there are several small buildings and a cemetery that often appears in Bravo's views from the studio window. The cemetery is very old. Late in the afternoon men come and sit beside the tombs, reading or talking, and children play among them.
THE INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS
The last exhibition while the artist was alive. Claudio Bravo next to the Emperatriz de Irán and the Marlborough Gallery director, Pierre Levai. Image: Marlborough Gallery Archive.
In 1981, the Marlborough Gallery organized its first exhibition of Claudio Bravo’s works: twenty-three paintings and drawings, among them The fortune-teller (1981), whose topic, suits and accessories form a very representative admirable composition of the painter's adoptive country. You could contemplate Vanitas (1981, Museum of Dies Arts, Boston) also. During the following twenty years, Claudio Bravo it exposed a dozen of times, in the Marlborough galleries of New York, London, Madrid and Monaco, as well as in FLAC of Paris in 1992.

In 1987, Elvehjem Museum of Art of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, organized an itinerant titled exhibition Claudio Bravo: Painter and Draftsman. It was presented in the first place in Elvehjem, to move later to the museum Meadows of Southern Methodist University of Dallas (Texas), as well as to Duke University Museum of Art of Durham (North Carolina), in 1988. This exhibition, organized under guides of Edward J. Sullivan, had several important pieces coming from private exhibitions and of institutions like the foundation Juan March of Madrid, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen of Rotterdam, MOMA of New York or the Museum of Art of the University of Princeton. Also, works of Claudio Bravo were exposed in other many museums: Art Museum of Ateneum of Helsinki, Baltimore Museum of Art, Peter Ludwig Museum of Colony, Metropolitan Museum of Art from New York, Museum of Contemporary International Art Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, National Museum of Fine arts of Santiago and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A BRIEF COME BACK TO CHILE FOR
A NOTABLE EXHIBITION

In 1991, with the Gulf War beginnings, and encouraged by their family, Claudio Bravo acquired a farm in the south of Chile, in Llanquihue Lake. There he resided in several occasions before putting it for sale again in 2001. In that time, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes of Santiago organized a great exhibition about his work, and this event succeeded an important among the public. Claudio Bravo was, without a doubt, very admired in his native country. However, for many Chileans this exhibition was the first occasion to really discover the artist's works, since only they had been seen in reproductions. Two years later, in 1996, the center of social works Casita María, from New York, granted the artist her noted medal of gold. The same year Lerner & Lerner Editors, Madrid, published a monograph in color of its works, with texts of fame authors as Paul Bowles or Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2000, Claudio Bravo got the renowned Art Miami International Distinguished Artist Award.

The painter established his winter residence in Marrakech in 2000 and from then on it has shared his time between this city of the south of Morocco and his residence of Tangier. His last exhibition took place in the Marlborough Gallery of New York, on October of 2010.

Claudio Bravo has suddenly passed away, due to two heart attacks, on June 4th, 2011, at 74 years old,
while he was in his residence of Taroudant, Morocco, fully active and with an
over 50 years international consolidated career.