Jose Bordes Barrera

Of New York City and Juno Beach, Florida, b. August 29, 1929, a Catalan, in Uldecona, Tarragona, Spain. Finely educated in flamenco by Vicente Escudero, as a principal dancer under Escudero’s continuing tutelage, Jose toured Southern Europe and the United States in his early twenties. He loved America and became a U.S. citizen in 1956. He formed and choreographed his own dance company, Jose Barreras, toured Latin America and Canada, performed solos at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshire Mountains, at Chateau Madrid and Carnegie Hall in New York and further toured America with the Marina Svetlova Dance Company, also teaching Spanish dance and sevillanas to scores of ballet students every July at the Svetlova Dance Center in Dorset, Vermont for twenty-five years until 1998. He played character roles with Lincoln Center Repertory Theater.

Jose stopped touring shortly after the birth of his first child in 1973 and affiliated with the F.A.R. Gallery, then with the Wildenstein and Hammer Galleries in New York as salesman and curator, becoming fully immersed in his lifelong love of all fine art. Often consulting with clients on the framing, preservation and placements of their collections, Jose formed his own art installation company by 1986, serving designers, companies, private collectors and clients in New York, Florida and seven other states for over twenty-five years of service, mostly side-by-side with his wife. His arrangements and installations are in several interior design books and publications.

An artist himself, he created and hand-stitched his original abstract designs of pure silk on velvet, completing some sixty evening vests over forty years, with thousands of tiny, precise stitches, in his spare time, bartering many of them for prominent artists’ works. After a forty year hiatus, Jose had a new classical flamenco guitar made, was taking weekly brush-up lessons for a few years, locally, with a fine classical flamenco teacher, Erroll Putigna. He was playing tremolos and flamenco compositions daily until shortly before his passing. He designed and made frames for most of his own abstract art collection.

Jose is survived by his wife of twenty-two years, Donna Loughran Bordes-Barrera, by his former wife and the mother of his two children, Amanda Loutrel of Boston, Massachusetts, his daughter, Maria Elena Bordes-Maynard of San Antonio, Texas and

his son, Joshua Simo Bordes of Boston, Massachusetts as well as cousins, nieces and

nephews in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Mexico and Tarragona, Spain.

Donations in his memory may be made to The Society of the Four Arts, 2 Four Arts Plaza, Palm Beach, Fl. 33480.

He desired no memorial services.