Modesto

Modesto , city (1990 pop. 164,278), seat of Stanislaus co., central Calif., on the Tuolumne River, near the northern end of the San Joaquin valley; inc. 1884. The center of a farming and fruit-growing area, it has food-processing and canning plants, wineries, fruit orchards, and diversified manufacturing. Modesto also ships meat and dairy products and produces nuts, vegetables, and rice. It was one of the fastest-growing U.S. cities in the late 20th cent.

Modesto, California/USA Founded in 1870 by members of the Central Pacific Railroad and given its name from the Spanish modesto ‘modest’ when one of the directors from San Francisco, W. C. Ralston, modestly refused to have the settlement named after him.

Cuixart, Modesto (1925– ). Spanish painter, born in Barcelona, where he began studying medicine at the university in 1944. In 1946 he abandoned his course to devote himself to painting, having already exhibited his work with some success, and in 1948 he became a founder member of Dau al Set. He painted in the Surrealist manner favoured by the group, though with anticipations of expressive abstraction, and by the mid-1950s he was working in an Art Informel style. In the mid1960s his paintings began to assume a more mystical character, with bizarre suggestions of faces, limbs, or figures, and in the late 1960s his work became more representative, sometimes incorporating real objects attached to the surface of the canvas. Cuixart is one of the best-known Spanish artists of his generation and has won numerous awards.