Spanish painter, active mainly in France. He was born in Madrid, where he studied at a private academy, and moved to Paris in 1925. For a time he was influenced by the *Cubism of Juan *Gris, with his combination of fragmentation and flatness. Characteristically he used a flat pastel-coloured background against which he arranged groups of familiar objects in black outline. Later work has a decorative calligraphic quality more reminiscent of Henri *Matisse and Georges *Braque, applied to the middle-class domestic interior.