The classical anew
October 2012
In the last days of the 15th century, not long after Columbus had journeyed to America, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal met to divide the world as yet undiscovered between them.
They met in the Castilian town of Tordesillas on the Duero River – a small but then significant collection of stone churches and convents spread out on the chilly, windswept plains of Castile, nowadays bypassed by the N-VI highway as it barrels north towards the province of León and the mountains beyond. It was here in 1494 that a line was conceived that split the potential riches of the world into two dominions. It is a line that survives to this day, immortalised in the border that separates Western Australian from the Northern Territory in the north and from South Australia in the south of our continent.
Such is the hand of Spanish history reaching out to us, from that pre-Enlightenment centre of world and European power – the dazzling absolutist state that might so easily have been the colonising parent who arrived from an unknown world to settle these lands. Just how different our history might have been – not only for our own development but for the Indigenous Australians – is a matter for the leisured historical imagination. There are glimpses aplenty to be had here, in the magnificent Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado now on display at the Queensland Art Gallery. It is an overwhelming exhibition which also happens to mark the closure of Tony Ellwood’s five-year Brisbane tenure, as he heads back to Melbourne this month to head up the NGV.
Major endeavours such as the touring of this exhibition to Australia are the opportunity for great scholarship, as the artwork, its place in European history and what it tells us about the world from which we emerged, is placed under renewed scrutiny. Chief Curator of Spanish Painting until 1700 at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, Javier Portús, has done a magnificent job and explains that Queensland Art Gallery represented a rare chance to show Spanish painting in an entirely new light. “Unlike in other museums where the space available to hang an exhibition is very restricted, and limited by the very structure of the buildings… in this case the space was very versatile, adaptable to hanging the collection in such a way as to create a new and unique narrative,” he says. “So here was a golden opportunity to create a narrative not conditioned by fixed structures and the history they may represent, and this opportunity played a part in determining the selection of works. What we have been able to create is a type of experiment, as far as usual representations of classical Spanish art are concerned.
“The Museo del Prado, for example, is organised by two criteria: chronology and School – such as Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, 18th century and 19th century,” Portús explains. “What we have done here in Brisbane is a kind of transfer of artworks across these chronological limits, taking into account not the century itself but the political development of Spanish painting. Thus we begin with the two centuries of the ancien regime, the time of Spain’s Golden Age, when the nation had not yet developed a bourgeoisie.” Highlights from this period include the ineffable Velázquez (El Niño de Vallecas, displayed here, is one of his truly great works), El Greco, Valdés Leal, Murillo, two quite extraordinary works from the genius of Ribera, Sánchez Coello and Titian. Australian audiences may well pinch themselves to see these works hung here amongst us.
Major changes were to come starting with the decade of 1770 (a singularly significant date in Australia’s history too) when the great European and American revolutionary period begins, a time of crisis and social, political and economic change, but also of great shifts in thought, through the French revolution and on into the years of the Napoleonic Wars, which had such a profound effect on Spain.
“This is the beginning of the modern world, and here, while Goya is usually considered a painter of the 18th century, we have the opportunity to see his work in the light of his being an exceptional witness to these years of turmoil,” insists Portús.
No artist so announced the beginning of the modern world, born of revolution and warfare, with all their attendant horrors, as Francisco de Goya. “So much of what he painted was without reference or comparison to anything being done, either in Spain or indeed anywhere in Europe at the time,” confirms Portús. “Goya is an artist who painted not just to the order of his clients, but who produces a vast catalogue of his own work, unprompted, work that is free, utterly distinct, and astonishing.”
The series Los Caprichos shows us Goya as an artist deeply engaged with the values of the Enlightenment, says Portús, who nevertheless converts his series into a critique. “But his critique is based on the belief that through Reason, one can improve society. It’s a type of enlightened optimism in the capacity of education.” This optimism vanishes as Goya becomes witness to the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, and to the atrocities meted out on both sides. Now in his fifties and sixties, Goya documents in The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) this convulsive period of Spanish and European history. “Goya was not only a witness, but gave the most penetrating of interpretations of what was occurring. He was not viewing the glorious battlefield from afar, but was close up, in the furious heat of war and its effects on people. He was the first painter to describe war from the point of view of the ragged and desperate victims of its violence, and in this he is totally contemporary. He is the first painter to transcend the confines of a particular war and portray war as a convulsive, universal human experience. In his final series, Los Disparates, Goya has passed to the most absolute pessimism – human life is no longer bound by rationality but is prey to the forces of the irrational and the unconscious. In this too he is a century ahead of his time.”
The exhibition contains many other delights, including an entire room given over to superb examples of the bodegón, or still life. This was a much pursued subject in these times, and one at which Spanish painters excelled. Devoid of the usual narrative devices, the still life documents the rise of an acquisitive and cultured middle class and the arrival, into the domestic salons of the Spanish people, of the wondrous plants and treasures from other continents. The still life is an essentially bourgeois genre, argues Portús, but one which reveals surprising depths, being a window or snapshot of social mores and values, a kind of social archeology, a documentary of middle class desires. On top of that, the still life was a site where the most exquisite techniques of brushwork were on display, precursors to the twentieth century’s hyper-realists.
With a richly illustrated and documented catalogue, this exhibition is a priceless window on three centuries of Spanish art. Linking to the present and Spain’s intense visual arts culture, there are also parallel events on at QAGOMA, including 100 Years of Spanish Cinema and a retrospective of the career of Pedro Almodóvar. For the next three months, Brisbane awaits you.
Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado shows at the Queensland Art Gallery until November 4.
Image:
Diego Velázquez, 1599, Seville – 1660, Madrid. Francisco Lezcano, known as ‘El Niño de Vallecas’ (‘The Boy from Vallecas’) c.1636–38. Oil on canvas 107 x 83cm. Collection: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Photographic Archive, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
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