Vicente's father resigned his commission and moved his family to the capital, Madrid, where he worked as a buildings administrator for the Banco de España so that the children could be educated at good Jesuit schools.

Vicente was taken to the Museo del Prado by his father, an art enthusiast, almost every Sunday from the time he was four years old and began to draw when he was sixteen.

[1] Vicente enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1921 intending to study sculpture.

[2] After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 Vicente, supporting the Loyalist forces, painted camouflage in the mountains outside Madrid for a few months.

The (Loyalist) Spanish Ambassador to the U.S. set him up as a Vice Consul in Philadelphia, a position which supported his family for three years.

Vicente had ample time to continue with his art and had his first one-man show in New York at the Kleeman Gallery in 1937.

Subsequently he was represented by the Leo Castelli, André Emmerich[7] and Berry-Hill Galleries in New York City.

Although he never exhibited in Spain during the rule of Francisco Franco, in 1998 the Spanish government opened the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art in Segovia.

[4] In March 2011 the Grey Art Gallery at New York University exhibited Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente.