The funeral of Luis Ortega (Eddy Mosiev) was held at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. He passed away at 74 in the Russian capital.
Born in Spain in 1937, he parents were killed in as the Spanish Civil War drew to an end in 1939. He was adopted by the family of a Macedonian engineer and brought to Moscow. He was given the name Eddy Mosiev but returned to his original name in the 1980s.
A painter and engraver, Luis Ortega created his own method of engraving known as incorel (informal color relief). This allowed the maestro to use 82 different colors in his engraving prints. He began exhibiting his works in the late 1950s and was admitted into the Artists Union of the USSR in 1964.
“Don Luis is one of the three brilliant Spaniards to achieve the Olympus of the art of engraving, alongside Goya and Picasso,” said Francisco-Xavier de Salas Bosch, director of the Prado Museum from 1970 to 1978.
Luis Ortega’s works brought him 14 major international awards and can be found in the collections of museums in over 30 countries worldwide.
At the Pushkin Museums of Fine Arts’ exhibition 500 Years of Etching, Don Ortega’s works were put on display alongside those of Picasso, Matisse and Dali. His portrait gallery of Russian classics include depictions of Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marina Tvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, which decorate the halls of museums dedicated to these authors in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Ortega illustrated more than 70 books by Soviet and Russian authors, with is illustrations of a collection of Pushkin’s poems winning him an international award. In 1996 Luis Ortega published his own collection of poems, Day of Silence, for which he won a literary award.
Luis Ortega was an academician of the Russian Academy of Arts in Florence. The Luis Ortega International Foundation operates in 14 countries. According to the experts of the foundation, there are more than 1200 private collections of the artist’s engravings all over the world.
Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service
