Welcome—And Why I’m Telling My Grandfather’s Story

I have an image in my mind that I've carried for as long as I can remember. I am six or seven years old, sitting on a rug in my grandparents' house in Ross, California — a small, leafy town north of San Francisco that I had traveled to from Italy, as my family and I did sometimes at Christmas or in the summer. My grandmother Helen, whom we called Mamita, is on the couch. Next to her, in his own chair, is my grandfather. He has a dark green plaid blanket on his lap. And he is laughing — not a big laugh, but an enthusiastic one, his head tilted back.

I didn't know then that the blanket was hiding the missing part of his leg. I didn't know that he was already in the last years of his life, that the disease slowing him down would take him within a few years of that visit. I didn't speak enough English to really talk to him, and his English was heavily accented and hard for me to understand; we lived an ocean apart and saw each other rarely. But I always felt a pull toward him — an affinity I couldn't quite explain, even as a child.

My name is Paola Coda-Nunziante, and José Moya del Pino (whom most people simply called Moya) was my grandfather. This blog is my attempt to introduce him to the wider world — and to tell a story that sounds almost fantastical to me.

José Moya del Pino with wife Helen Horst and daughter Beatriz Diana (my mother)

A Man Two Worlds Never Quite Knew

José Moya del Pino lived, as the biography I co-authored with Miguel Forcada Serrano puts it, two entirely separate lives. The first was in Spain, where he was born in Priego de Córdoba (a small Baroque town in Andalusia) in 1890, and where, by his mid-thirties, he had become one of the most celebrated illustrators of the Madrid modernist movement, a portraitist who painted King Alfonso XIII, and the creator of the only complete copy of Velasquez's entire body of work ever made. The second life was in California, where an ambitious cultural exhibition cut short by unexpected obstacles left him stranded in San Francisco in 1925, and where he rebuilt himself from nothing into a prominent portraitis and muralists of the American West — contributing work to Coit Tower, the Golden Gate International Exposition, and a string of New Deal post offices from the Bay Area to West Texas.

Those who knew his first life almost entirely ignored the second. Those who knew him in California knew almost nothing of his years in Spain. He was, in a very real sense, a different man to different people — a Madrid bohemian to one world, a California artist to another — and no single account had ever united the two. A library in Ross bears his name, but in his own hometown of Priego, until very recently, he was largely unknown. That asymmetry is part of what drove the book. It is part of what drives this blog.

I grew up hearing fragments of his story — and the fragments were extraordinary enough to sound like fiction. Running away from home as a child to join an itinerant painter traveling the villages of Andalusia. Studying in Paris alongside Matisse and Modigliani. Being presented to the King of Spain. Crossing the Atlantic with forty-one hand-painted copies of Velásquez under his arm, only to be abandoned by everyone who had promised to support him. Marrying a San Francisco heiress. Painting a fresco in the the interior of Coit Tower during the Great Depression while a communist controversy threatened to shut the whole project down.

From Family Memory to Biography

As a child I simply wanted to hear the amazing stories. As an adult — and as a graphic designer who was always told she had "inherited Grandfather's artistic talent" — I began to feel that his life deserved to be told properly, and not just to the grandchildren. So I joined forces with Miguel Forcada Serrano, a historian and the official chronicler of Priego de Córdoba, who had independently been researching my grandfather's Spanish years. Together we spent years in archives in Spain and California, interviewed my mother and aunt, consulted the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and tracked down paintings that had been lost, stolen, or simply forgotten.

The result was the biography, published in 2021, "José Moya del pino — Two Lives of an Artist." This blog is its companion — a way of sharing the story chapter by chapter, making it accessible to readers who might not pick up a full biography but who are curious about art history, about Spanish modernism, about the New Deal muralists, about the remarkable human drama of emigration and reinvention. Each post will explore a different chapter of his life: his Andalusian roots, his Paris years, the Velázquez project, the murals you can still visit today, the paintings whose whereabouts remain a mystery.

I write as his granddaughter, with all the personal feeling that implies. But I also write as his co-biographer, with a commitment to accuracy and historical context. Both are true at once — which is, perhaps, the most honest way to tell the story of a man who was himself always more than one thing at a time.

The blanket-covered chair in that Ross living room turns out to have been a wheelchair. The laughing man in it turns out to have been one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century, whose story spans two continents and two world wars and nearly a century of art history. I hope, through these posts, to give him back the full shape of his life.

Welcome to the blog. Let's begin.