Robert Harvey, from 'eclectic' pop artist in the USA to 'Don Roberto' in rural Malaga

The doctor could not believe his eyes. "Who is this foreigner? No one from Malaga has ever had so many people come to donate blood". While he was waiting to undergo a life-or-death operation in a hospital in Malaga, several friends were stretching out their arms in a nearby room to donate blood for a transfusion that would prove vital to save his life.

The year was 1992 and that foreigner was Robert Harvey (1924, Lexington - 2004, Macharaviaya), the affable 'Don Roberto' to the locals and an "eclectic" pop artist for the artistic circuits. The American artist had found his place in the world in a corner of the Axarquía after rubbing shoulders with aristocrats, Hollywood stars and prestigious writers, from Barbara Hutton and Eva Marie Saint, to Truman Capote.

Now, 20 years after his death and 100 years after his birth, the small village of Macharaviaya in the Axarquía area to the east of Malaga province is paying tribute to the man who called the place home for many years.

The painter is remembered every year in the village (17 meetings of the Friends of Robert Harvey have taken place so far) and they all hold him in high regard, but the absence of his work in the public collections of his adopted homeland is incomprehensible. "Apart from the occasional presence in the Casa Natal de Picasso, neither the CAC nor the Museo de la Aduana have any of Robert's work. And that is a handicap, because if you have to get to know writers by reading them, you have to get to know painters by seeing them," says Alfredo Viñas, his former gallerist. Most of his work is in private collections. "And he deserves to have his own space, a room where people can enjoy him and keep him in their memory forever", adds José Antonio Robles, his heir.

"Don Roberto was a very good person", José Antonio repeats. "When you love someone like that, like a father, it's difficult," he says. José Antonio Robles was only 14 years old when he met Robert Harvey. The year was 1973. The American needed help to renovate the farmhouse he had just bought in Macharaviaya, which was once the summer residence of the illustrious Gálvez family.

Its name alone is evocative: La Huerta del Ángel. From then on, José Antonio worked by his side, taking care of the house, watering the plants, running errands and looking after him until the end, until a tumour took the artist's life suddenly in 2004. He was like a son and that is why he named him his heir.

José Antonio and his wife María Victoria only found out about the inheritance when the will was opened: suddenly they were the heirs of around 80 of Harvey's paintings, but they also received the responsibility of defending and disseminating the artist's legacy. They could have sold everything and led a more comfortable life, but by doing so they would have failed 'Roberto'. So, instead, they started to organise exhibitions with his collection, like the one that is currently on at the Museum of Nerja and the one on display in the Gálvez Museum in Macharaviaya, with paintings from his private collection to mark the centenary of his birth.

During the more than thirty years in his service, José Antonio witnessed how his art and his friendships grew in Malaga. He also improved his Spanish, although he never lost his strong American accent. La Huerta del Ángel - now rented out by an English couple for rural getaways - was during those three decades one of the most cosmopolitan places in Malaga, a place where artists and friends from Malaga met with others from San Francisco and New York over paella and good wine.

A couple of times, "at least", he was visited by Eva Marie Saint, Alfred Hitchcock's muse in films like North by Northwest and one of the few survivors of the golden Hollywood era who has celebrated her one hundredth birthday.

He moved naturally in those environments, "but he didn't show off". "It was very simple. You had to get it out of him because he didn't tell you by himself", says Antonio Delgado, one of the regulars at those meals in the Huerta del Ángel, a good friend.

He endeared himself. "He knew how to listen, and that's not something that happens very often," recalls Antonio. We did the maths and there was a 30-year difference between them. "I had never thought of that! He was a very jovial and at the same time very modern person". But really. "He used to say that modern is not what is fashionable, that it is an attitude that you either have or you don't have". And Robert had it.

Moreover, "he was a walking encyclopaedia". His house up in Macharaviaya received everything from the New Yorker to the latest international film, fashion and art magazines. He was up to date with everything and had a broad education. Little Bobby, as he was called at school, was always clear about his path.

In the Spanish documentary 'Oficio de pintor, oficio de vivir' (Cedecom), he tells how, as a child, the teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. And he did not hesitate: "I am a painter", he said in the present tense. When they met years later, by then an artist, the teacher had not forgotten that blunt answer.

At a very young age he began to travel the world: at the age of 18 he left North Carolina to study in Florida at the Sarasota School of Art; shortly afterwards he moved to New York to work for a framing company that introduced him to artistic circles; and years later he got a place at the Institute of Art in San Francisco. For twenty years he was part of the bohemian and extravagant life of the Californian city, never ceasing to travel around the USA and Europe. One of these routes took him to Spain with the wealthy Barbara Hutton.

Until the Vietnam War broke out. As he told his family, his opposition to the conflict drove him to leave the USA. Widowed at the age of 30, Robert wanted to make sure his son didn't go to fight. One day he saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for a house in Frigiliana and that was where he went. He was 47 years old when he settled in what was his gateway to the Axarquía. The following year, on one of his walks, he saw La Huerta del Ángel in the distance, with its roofs fallen down and half destroyed, but it captivated him.

This is the official version of why he ended up in Malaga, but few people today believe it to be true. "I'm convinced that he was fleeing from a past he didn't like at all", says his friend Antonio Delgado, who has given this question a lot of thought. The son was an excuse. In fact, he never accompanied him to Spain and they always had a very complicated relationship. He simply "wanted to start a new life" and overcome a cycle of depression.

The change of scenery worked. "Here he grew and grew. Breaking away from the USA was a turning point. He had chosen his family, everyone was devoted to him," says his friend Antonio. And his art evolved. "Formally he was very pop, but the contents of his work were very different from those of interest at that time in the USA, which were very oriented towards the media and mass culture", says Alfredo Viñas, who paraphrases the critic Enrique Castaños when he defined him as "an eclectic pop artist". He was a "very free" creator.

He was influenced by the techniques present in American art of the 1950s and 1960s, such as photorealism, "but he did not maintain a servitude to that language". His palette, Viñas recalls, "became clearer in his later years with delicate transparencies". And he became more creative. Inspired by the rural world and, after the serious operation in 1992, he began to paint landscapes, fields of wheat, bougainvillaea, almond trees... for the first time. "I was still painting people, but I could do other things," says Delgado. It was his way of making the most of the extension that life had given him.

His memory continues to be the reason for a reunion every year and this year even more so. On Saturday 28 September, the Asociación La Huerta del Ángel-Amigos de Robert Harvey is organising a day of celebration in Macharaviaya, with a talk on his life - with Lorenzo Saval, Guillermo Busutil, Antonio Delgado and the mayor Antonio Campos. Two sculptures by Harvey will be inaugurated in the streets of the village and Don Roberto will be home again.