Madrid, Rome, Paris, and the School of the World

In 1907, just a few years after arriving in Granada, Moya del Pino moved to Madrid to continue his studies. He enrolled in the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts (then known as the Special School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving), where admission was highly competitive, with rigorous testing, and few students were accepted.

He wasted no time immersing himself in Spain's artistic heritage and immediately registered as a copyist at the Prado Museum. While most seventeen-year-olds arriving in a new city would explore the neighborhood, find their footing, get their bearings... Moya headed straight for Spain's greatest art collection.

He also studied under Joaquín Sorolla, who was known to mentor particularly gifted Academy students. Sorolla greatly admired the Old Masters and had himself copied works by Velázquez at the Prado, providing a model Moya would later follow.

The Prado Museum (retrieved from https://www.afpradomuseum.org/history-1). Joaquin Sorolla by Gertrude Käsebier, 1908 (public domain, retrieved from Wikipedia).

From Madrid to Rome to Paris: A Decisive Detour

Moya completed his studies with distinction, earning medals in Art History and Anatomy, and by 1910 had mastered the academic tradition. The question was no longer whether he could become a skilled painter, but what kind of painter he wanted to be. The Premio de Roma offered one answer. Awarded each year to Spain's most promising young painters, the prestigious scholarship sent its recipients to Rome to draw from classical sculpture in the museums, work among the ancient ruins, and absorb the power and grace of the classical world.

Moya won it. He went to Rome. And almost immediately, he found the Academy there just as stale as the one he'd left in Madrid — conservative in exactly the same ways, just with ruins outside the window. He realized that the education he sought was no longer to be found within the walls of Europe's great academies. So he wrote to the Foreign Office requesting permission to transfer his scholarship to Paris. Rome reinforced the past; Paris pointed toward the future. Permission was granted, and it proved to be one of the most consequential decisions of his life.

Figure-drawing class at the Colarossi Academy in Montparnasse, a progressive alternative to the Academy of Fine Arts of Paris.

Paris between 1910 and 1915 was, in the most literal sense, the center of the art world. Moya arrived into this world and thrived. He attended the Colarossi Academy, considered "rebellious" at the time as a progressive alternative to the Academy of Fine Arts that was still anchored in the conservative tradition. He took classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, which operated on a ticket system: students could buy their way into individual classes the way one buys a movie ticket, creating a fluid, self-directed education. He met Matisse and Modigliani, both of whom became good friends.

Through Diego Rivera (whose friendship he would later renew in San Francisco) and Juan Gris, Moya was introduced to the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein. At their apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, the Steins surrounded themselves with works by Matisse, Picasso, and other pioneers of modernism, creating what was arguably the most concentrated collection of avant-garde paintings in private hands anywhere in the world.

In May 1913, he was in the audience for the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées — the most notorious opening night in the history of music, when the crowd booed, jeered, and fought while the conductor kept the orchestra playing through the uproar. Moya didn't join the riot; but he later recalled something stranger than the riot itself: people being paid to throw tomatoes at the performers, just to keep the chaos going.

(1) Henri Matisse in 1913. (2) Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1918, in his studio rue de la Grande-Chaumière, at Montparnasse, Paris, (3) The atelier of Diego Rivera in Rue du Départ, Paris, in 1916 (Diego Rivera, Ehrenbourg and Juan Gris), by Marevna (Marie Vorobieff). (4) Leo and Gertrude Stein, c. 1905. All images are public domain, retrieved from Wikimeda Commons except for Leo & Gertrude Stein retrieved from WikiArt.

Years later, Moya recalled that he had "become a Cubist" for a time, exhibiting works at both the Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne; a brief but genuine engagement with the avant-garde that left a permanent imprint on his thinking about composition and color. Paris gave him something no academy alone could have supplied: an understanding of the full range of what painting could do, and a confident personal position within it. He was not a Cubist, not a Futurist, not a pure classicist — but an artist deeply rooted in the Spanish Baroque tradition who had fully inhabited the European avant-garde without being captured by it.

When the First World War broke out, Moya tried to enlist in the French army. He was refused, as he was a foreign national. Instead, he was assigned to guard the sheep kept in the Bois de Boulogne as emergency food reserves — “because the French supposed that all Spaniards were sheep herders,” he later quipped.

By late 1916 he had returned to Madrid.

At the Center of Everything

The decision to exchange Rome for Paris proved pivotal. Madrid had given him technical discipline and respect for tradition. Rome convinced him that academic training alone was not enough. Paris exposed him to the artists who were redefining painting itself. By immersing himself in the artistic ferment of Montparnasse, he witnessed firsthand the debates that would shape twentieth-century painting. The artists, writers, and collectors he encountered challenged accepted ideas about representation, color, composition, and the very purpose of art.

When he returned to Spain in 1916 and later devoted himself to the study of Velázquez, he was not turning away from modernism. He approached the Old Masters with the confidence of someone who had witnessed the birth of modern art and understood that every artistic revolution rests on a profound command of tradition.