Collection

Painter. Dobal first studied with Spaniard Alejandro Sánchez Felipe and later, in 1935, at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, with a scholarship from El Mundo newspaper. He returned to Puerto Rico in 1938. He and painter Julio Tomás Martínez are considered the most innovative artists of their time, Dobal because he distanced himself completely from the representational style of painting cultivated by other Puerto Rican painters and instead created works reflecting the formal characteristics of such European schools of the twenties as Cubism and Surrealism. He did continue to portray Puerto Rican subjects, however, in strongly drawn compositions with pure, warm colors. His figures are depicted in stylized, geometrical forms, almost in the manner of Abstraction. His production was limited, since he abandoned painting to devote himself to his career as a medical technician.