From El Greco to Goya to Picasso

"... This exhibition provides a revolutionary new perspective on Spanish painting of the past five centuries.... Carefully chosen comparisons reveal previously unseen links between artists working in very different historical contexts, even as they bring the exquisite paintings of Spain's Golden Age onto the museum stage."

"SPANISH PAINTING from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History" is a panoramic overview of five centuries of Spanish art. Approximately 140 paintings by Spanish masters, including El Greco, Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Zurbaran, Jose de Ribera, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Goya, Juan Gris, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, have been culled from private and public collections throughout Spain, Europe, and the U.S.

Unlike other overviews that display paintings in a strictly chronological order, this exhibition is presented in 15 distinct sections, each based on a theme running through the past five centuries of Spanish culture. These thematic axes reveal the connections and affinities between the old masters and the modern era through a series of carefully chosen, content-based clusters. Accordingly, within each section, works from different periods appear side by side, offering often radical juxtapositions that cut across time to reveal the overwhelming coherence of the Spanish tradition. These sections not only articulate the dominant trends of the Spanish School, but reveal the Spanishness of great 20th-century artists who lived abroad--Picasso, Gris, Miro, and Dali.

The sections are titled: "Monks," "Bodegones," "Landscapes," "The Domestic World," "Women in Public," "Weeping Women," "Virgins and Mothers," "Nudes," "Childhood," "Monstruos," "Knights and Ghosts," "Ladies," "Crucifixions," "The Fallen," and "Flyers." Especially significant works include Zurbaran's magnificent "Saint Hugh in the Refectory" (c. 1655) in a rare appearance outside of Spain; Juan Sanchez Cotan's "Still Life with Cardoon and Parsnips" (c. 1604); Miro's "The Table (Still Life with Rabbit)" (c. 1920); Dali's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, One Second before Awakening" (1944); El Greco's "The Vision of Saint John" (c. 1608); Murillo's "The Virgin of the Rosary" (c. 1650); Goya's "The Duchess of Alba" (1797); and Ribera's "Apollo and Marsyas" (1637), as well as nearly 35 works by Picasso, including his important "Portrait of Jaime Sabartes" (1939) and "The Infanta Margarita Maria from 'The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas),' after Velazquez" (1957).

Until recently, art historians bracketed Spanish painting between El Greco and Goya, maintaining that 20th-century, avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism--both of which were pioneered by artists of Spanish origin--broke completely with the traditions that preceded them. Today, however, there is sufficient historical perspective to see that, despite their revolutionary aesthetic leaps, the great artists of the early 20th century were nourished by traditional models that were local in character. These models found their source in the Spanish School of the late 16th and 17th centuries, an era commonly regarded as the Golden Age of Spanish Painting. The aesthetic styles developed during these years from the visionary opulence of El Greco to the intimate naturalism of Velazquez--dominated artistic production in Spain throughout the following two-and-a-half centuries, as the nation's imperial power declined and Spain increasingly became isolated internationally. Even Goya, arguably the greatest Spanish painter of the 19th century, could break free from his forerunners only by facing them square in the eye. As the French romantic poet Theophile Gautier observed, "In his desire for artistic innovation, Goya found himself confronted by the old Spain."

By the late 19th century, following Goya and the spirit of romanticism, a national critical conscience had awoken in Spain's artists and intellectuals, but the country's antiquated political, social, and economic structures largely thwarted this modernizing impulse. So began a long period of exile or simple emigration, which marked the careers of all the 20th-century masters exhibited here. During this time, many stereotypical treatments that had formed in the wake of Spain's Golden Age were cast in a new light, as Europe rediscovered the art of the Spanish School and began to write its history for the first time. Chief among these was Spain's resolute anticlassicism, reflected in its timeless customs, culture, and art, and which came to be seen as a source of resistance to the overwhelming homogeneity associated with an industrialized, modern world. Thus, as artists stigmatized the ideological cliches of traditional Spain, they also realized that formal innovation only could come if these same aesthetic values were brought up to date. It is this endless return and reappropriation on a formal and iconographic level that binds together these works, from Picasso, reaching back through Goya, to the masters of the Golden Age.