'Chauve', the Madrid master from when lead did not mean death, but an art, dies

Joaquin Vidal

Updated Saturday, February 17, 2024-00:42

Vicente Juliá

,

Chauve

, (Tetouan, Morocco, 1930), an artist who achieved great prestige among collectors of lead miniatures, died this Wednesday, February 14 in Madrid. Juliá was the owner of

Chauve

, the store that was a refuge until the early 2000s for

Madrid

's main collectors , located on Jorge Juan Street, with windows displaying his famous lead soldiers and electric trains. The work of Vicente Juliá, recognized as perhaps the great master of the specialty in our country, is exhibited today in different museums in Spain. From the

Army Museum, the Naval Museum, museums in Valencia

or Llerena (Badajoz) where he had family ties, even at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.

Chauve

's store

looked like a toy store, but it wasn't exactly that

. The tin soldier, the electric trains (many from Germany, where his brother traveled to buy them in the 60s and 70s), are a refuge for childhood. A childhood that was revisited by cultural and political personalities in the 80s and 90s, who came to shop and chat with Vicente Juliá, with his characteristic Protectorate accent, which he never lost.

In the depths of the store, among a haze of tobacco smoke, the craftsmen of Juliá's school were busy finishing off and painstakingly painting by hand each little soldier, each flag, each detail of a morion or a halberd. The molds were made personally by Vicente Juliá, figures that were characteristic for their absolute historiological rigor and for their artistic interpretation, with a slightly disproportionate head because it was large and with a different expression in each soldier.

The thing is that Vicente Juliá was neither a craftsman, nor an industrialist, nor a salesman, much less a marketing salesperson. He was an artist, whom those of us who were friends of his son in El Pilar could see on Sunday afternoons at his house, disheveled, in a bathrobe, with a cigar in his mouth and the color palette in one hand, the brush in ready in the other, painting some watercolor while listening to opera at full volume, to the scandal of his neighbors on Barceló Street, right next to the

Pachá

nightclub .

Shelves with tin soldiers from 'Chauve'.

Vicente Juliá had the soul of a painter, from the Tetuán school, not in vain

Mariano Bertuchi

was his teacher. His passion for opera, painting, the military, and the traditions of our country led him to transcend the world of military miniatures. And to this he applied his wisdom with lead. His is an impressive collection of 21 lead operas, reproductions of sets from opera premieres in the 19th century at La Scala in Milan, or in Paris. To document himself, he stacked up in his office, among wisps of cigar smoke, hundreds of pamphlets, books, prints, purchased in second-hand bookstores, true jewels in themselves, with the paper already shriveled and yellowed.

In lead he reproduced, among many other works, the scenic iconography of historical operas, up to 61 scenes from the Holy Scriptures, the Corpus Christi procession in Valencia in 1913 (which occupies dozens of meters), the history of the uniforms of the Spanish Navy , of the national flag, or a unique bullring from the 1950s, in which each third was reproduced, which is housed in the Museum of the City of Madrid. Among other great works, such as what he called "the sculptures."

Perspectives and color

It has already been said that Vicente Juliá was not a marketinian, which is why his genius deserved a better name: he reproduced historical paintings and oil paintings using lead figures. This required a prodigious work of perspectives and color treatments of each figure, since the result is that from the front you see

Goya

's executions , just as he painted them, and if you move your view you see that the figures are made of lead and you can appreciate many more perspectives, as if one were a real-time spectator of that scene. Several of these works are part of the artistic collections of the Ministry of Defense and are exhibited in some of the most noble rooms of its headquarters, on Paseo de la Castellana.

The smoke of black tobacco, the characteristic smell of molten lead and paints, were dissipating from

Jorge Juan

's historic store , as a result of modernity, the strength of the real estate market and the retirement age of Vicente Juliá. By then, going to Nuremberg to the electric train fairs stopped being a feat and became an expensive exoticism without a commercial encore. The time has come for recognition and interest from museums. From the nineteenth-century scenes that he had in the old Army Museum, installed in the Hall of Thrones in Madrid, to today's modern museum in the Alcázar of Toledo. His reproductions of battles from the Carlist Wars were so brilliant, they survived the move and are still displayed there. Of the few recognitions that he did not achieve was his dream of the Army Award, which recognizes each year the miniaturists of the magnificent Spanish school.

Morocco, the Protectorate, that charming and white Tetouan, the cosmopolitan Tangier where Spanish and French were spoken never left his mind, as did that peculiar and charming hissing accent. A vestige, just as his work has been, of the creative genius and colors of those latitudes. He had to stop smoking, but he did not stop painting, creating hundreds of drawings and oil paintings, nor playing chess, not even when the harassments of age came to visit him. All of this, what he was, what he saw, thought, dreamed and created can be found now, in distant and dispersed museum rooms. Those for whom the immersive museum fashion that is imposed today still leaves a gap where they can see meritorious works made by hand by artists who found in minor arts such as lead a way to leave art. From when lead was not synonymous with killing, but with recreating history and beauty, with good taste and delicacy. An art, in short. The one from

Chauve

.