JoséMaríaSert

José María Sert (1874–1945) was a Catalan painter and decorator renowned for the monumental murals he produced across Europe and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Barcelona to a family of textile industrialists, Sert moved to Paris in 1899, establishing a studio in the Rue Barbet de Jouy and traveling to Italy to study the Venetian masters and Michelangelo, whose influence would inform the dramatic scale and chiaroscuro of his later mural cycles.

Commissioned in 1900 by King Alfonso XIII to decorate the Cathedral of Vic, Sert spent much of his career alternating between this project — twice destroyed and rebuilt, first by the Spanish Civil War and finally unveiled in its second version in 1945 — and a wide-ranging international practice for private and civic patrons, including the ballrooms of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York (1929) and residences for the Rothschild family, Coco Chanel, and the Duchess of Alba.

Sert was closely associated with the Ballets Russes, designing stage sets and costumes in the 1910s and 1920s, and moved in the social and artistic circles of Paris around his wife Misia Godebska, a celebrated muse and patron of the arts. In 1931 he contributed to the decoration of the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York, working alongside Diego Rivera and Frank Brangwyn on one of the most prominent public mural commissions of the era.

Sert’s photographic studies for these mural projects — preparatory études for the Cathedral of Vic and for the Rockefeller Center vestibule among them — document the working process behind large-scale decorative painting rarely preserved from this period. He died in Barcelona in 1945, having just unveiled the final version of his Vic murals weeks earlier.