Antonio Bonet Correa (La Coruña 1925-Madrid 2020), was one of the most distinguished figures in the conformation of art history in Spain if not its inventor. He was a handsome man, distinguished-looking, a little French in taste and form; he had a shrewd sense of humor and a capacity for storytelling that captivated those willing to go beyond what was expected in the second race.
Professor Bonet, Don Antonio – as the professors of his seminary affectionately called him – had the strange quality of transmitting his enormous enthusiasm for knowledge, a scholarship so deep and so versatile that it was not necessary to display it; a certain genuine pleasure towards life that he never lost, that he kept alive throughout his long and prolific career that would begin in France, where he studied at the Institut d’Historie de l’Art of the University of Paris and graduated in Museology from the Louvre School, being an assistant professor at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1952 and 1957. There he would meet his wife Monique, with whom he would have three children: Isabel, the flute player and musicologist Pierre Bonet and the writer and researcher Juan Manuel Bonet.
He obtained his doctorate in Spain in 1959 and after a brief stint at the Complutense University and the Higher School of Architecture of Madrid, he obtained a chair first in Murcia and then in Seville. In 1973 he won the chair of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he assumed the post of vice-rector between 1981 and 1983. He spent a good part of his life in this city and thus describes it in his speech on the occasion of the International Geocritical Award in 2013: “The modern city and the traditional city coexisted without finding the harmony that an urban planner would have wanted. Later, after many years, I would know the transformation of a city in which I have spent most of my life and in which, at present, I live in its central part. ”
This was his way of approaching things: generous but inquisitive, innovative but erudite; curious until the end, losing patience in recent months for not having all the material on hand for his great book on Vitrubio, which alternated with a project by the painter Pérez Villalta. Bonet Correa was, in fact, much more than one of the highest authorities in the Baroque period with essential books- Architecture in Galicia in the 17th century (his doctoral thesis), Baroque Andalusia or his studies on the Plaza Mayor. He was an innovator with his pioneering works on festivals or on the baroque in Latin America that made him travel around that continent when few even took it into account. He was more than the Director of the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts and a member of many others; more than a distinguished member of the Board of the Academy of Spain in Rome or the Prado Museum since 2002 and Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2012.
Bonet Correa was, above all, a tireless traveler, a cosmopolitan who aspired to know reality to the bottom; a lucid writer and extraordinary prose writer: it is demonstrated in one of his last works, the delicious book Los cafés históricos. In this he directed his art collection in the seventies and eighties, one of the most groundbreaking. He was, moreover, a cultural agitator before the term was even codified in that peaceful Madrid, but eager for changes in the early 1980s. From his sharp eyes, attentive to what was happening, he contributed to the development of contemporary art in Spain before the country even knew that such a thing existed. Often in the shadows – not out of false modesty but out of attachment to his freedom – he supported ARCO, the babble of criticism in EL PAÍS or the courses at the Menéndez Pelayo University. In one of the most mythical about Surrealism, Bonet, with his amazing ability for the ars combinatoria, combined the avant-garde – Maruja Mallo and Pepe Caballero – with some of his most notable disciples: Juan Antonio Ramírez, Ángel González and Francisco Calvo Serraller. Then, when the time came, when the last three left us prematurely, he dismissed them with that sobriety of his Roman patrician. As a teacher he was enthusiastic and detached, able to support, against the opinions of others, subjects sometimes considered less academic, ready to take the risk with the young researchers. It will leave a huge hole in the hearts of so many. The history of art – the world – is much darker without it.
Information from EL PAÍS. [Spanish]