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The Sweeping Spectacle of Spain: From Velázquez to Picasso
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14483 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1988 |
2,167 Words |
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Michael Gibson
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Wealth, power, mystical vision, decline, and contemplation of death--the substance of Spanish art clearly reflects the moods induced over the years by the country's changing fortunes. Yet we can only perceive these changes when enough art has been gathered together to give form to impalpable flux. Such was the case in Paris recently, thanks to an ambitious grouping of four exhibitions on loan from Spain under the sweeping but entirely justified title, Five Centuries of Spanish Art. The first exhibition, From El Greco to Picasso, showed 150 works by nearly seventy artists and was presented at the Petti Palais. The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris offered the second, The Century of Picasso, displaying two hundred works by Spanish artists of the twentieth century--a show constantly punctuated by the thunder of the inexhaustible Picasso. Two smaller exhibitions at the same museum concentrated on recent years: The New Imagination: The years 1970-1980, and Spain '87--Dynamics and Interrogations.
Catholic Orthodoxy
The fourfold exhibition began with the sixteenth century--a time when Spain, at the height of its wealth and power under the Hapsburgs, was also mercilessly driven by an austere and demanding religious vision of itself as the fender for the Christian faith and Catholic orthodoxy. During this turbulent period, Spain amassed great wealth and used the bountiful treasures brought from the New World in its efforts to fight both the Turks and the Reformation.
This helps to explain why Spanish art usually seems more militant than that of Italy; it also reveals the root of the peculiar mood of the period. It was in this context that El Greco, settling in Toledo in the seventeenth century, shook off the slick polish and conventional attitudes he had acquired in Italy and began to paint elongated figures that appear to flicker furiously like flames, their clothes carried upward by a fiery turbulence, their vigorously asymmetrical faces expressive of tension and ecstasy. The utter originality of El Greco's art surely owes much to the dark-flame of Spanish religious passion that he discovered when he reached the country as an artist on the threshold of his dazzling maturity.
The same age that saw the appearance of this visionary work also produced paintings that can at first perplex the viewer. The Spanish sensibility is often marked by Baroque enthusiasm, but there is also something much darker and more intensely tragic than anything encountered in the familiar repertoire of French or Italian art. One is struck, for instance, by the frequency with which portrayals of people marked by a heavy genetic fate--a bearded woman, a six-year-old girl weighing 120 pounds (generally referred to as "La Monstrua"), and a good number of court dwarfs--appear in this exhibition. The Vice-Roi of Naples commissioned José de Ribera to paint a woman with entirely masculine features and a bearded face breast-feeding her infant daughter. The artist managed to handle this difficult subject with dignity and a certain low-key compassion.
It has been argued that this taste for the abnormal is not exclusive to Spanish art. For example, a good number of Italian artists also devoted paintings to similar subjects. This fascination, we are told, was a product of the Renaissance, an outcropping of a new interest taken in all unusual manifestations of nature. Still, the Spanish court commissioned an exceptional number of such paintings
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