The Meadows Museum’s current exhibition, “Fortuny to Picasso: Prelude to Spanish Modernism,” focuses on a widely unknown and under-recognized period of Spanish art production that was greatly influenced and infused by cosmopolitanism at the end of the 19th century.
The exhibition draws upon the work of 24 painters who, between 1860 and WWI, embraced an international approach to art, largely through travel or relocation to Paris and other growing European cities.
It was in these cities that painters appropriated new styles and techniques, many from the Impressionists and Symbolists. Moving through the galleries, though, one is caught by the feeling that these paintings are not mere replications of Manet or Monet.
Whether this can be identified as “Spanish-ness” or just similar stylistic interpretations of individual painters working in close temporal and physical proximity is unknown, but the treatment and choice of subject material, color and form is striking.
The paintings on view represent a new way of life, of leisure and of the everyday.
Surprisingly evident are binary tensions – the new and old, the urban and pastoral, the technological and agricultural, and the past and future.
Dario de Regoyos’ “Good Friday in Castille, 1896,” perfectly exemplifies this paradox in its depiction of a steam engine crossing a bridge over a procession of priests in the countryside. Here is the recognized symbol of modernization moving above an ancient traditional ritual.
Simply put, these are paintings of the modern condition. The notion of internationalism and travel is inescapable. Not only were painters depicting the Parisian landscape or changing Spanish countryside, but also colonial North-Africa.
Depictions of the exotic “Other” comprise an interesting subtext to the exhibition.
This topic remains amazingly relevant to contemporary society in its cultural representations of Arabic culture and so called “foreign cultures.”
While the bulk of the 80 paintings in the exhibition are comprised of somewhat benign genres like landscape, still life and portraiture, viewed through the context of the social and political atmosphere of the time, they become testaments to rising bourgeoisie culture, Orientalism, nationalism and industrialization.
While subtexts abound in the exhibition, the paintings provide an immensely pleasurable visual vibrancy accessible to someone not interested or knowledgeable about the socio-political atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Europe.
The heightened realism of Venetian and French landscapes by Martin Rico Y Ortega and Emilio Sanchez Perrier, bucolic beach scenes by Joaquin Sorolla or a boldly linear depiction of Segovia by Ignacio Zuloaga all provide seemingly disparate but oddly complimentary takes on modern life.
The exhibition itself mirrors the spirit of internationalism it presents.
Not only is the catalogue bilingual, but the paintings themselves have come from some of the most prestigious museums in the world – some of which have never before been seen in the United States.
In addition, the symposium held this past weekend brought together pre-eminent scholars and curators.
The “Fortuny to Picasso” exhibit is on view in the Meadows museum through Feb. 26.
