Javier Otazu
New York, February 16 “The Sorolla Year” began this Thursday in the United States with an exhibition showing the public the sketches that the painter prepared for his monumental Vision of Spain, while waiting for these huge murals to be visited when the Hispanic Society (HS) reopens.
There are 33 large sketches -some are 4 meters long by one meter wide- made with the “gouache” technique where Sorolla repeated during the year 1912 his gallery of what was initially to be a frieze of the ‘History of Spain. ended up being a series of customary, almost anthropological portraits of different parts of the country.
Billionaire Archer Huntington, founder of HS and who commissioned the murals, was already aware that these sketches would be of great value and stated in the contract that all drafts would also remain in New York as part of the collection.
“There are those who consider the sketches to have more artistic value than the murals themselves,” Robert Yahner, curator of the exhibition, said in the room of the National Arts Club where they are displayed, and he reasons as follows: the sketches show a country in motion, with great spontaneity, while the murals end up being too theatrical, the “staging” is very visible.
WATERCOLORS ON KRAFT PAPER
Sorolla unfolded meters and meters of brown, very resistant brown paper, on which he applied gouache, and in some of them he used a then very new technique called “collaged paper”, consisting of pasting objects on people and people in the background until accumulating several layers of paper, recalls Marcus B. Burke, senior curator of the HS.
Some sketches are more accomplished than others, and several sketches of the same region are even shown, and these are invaluable documents for understanding the technique of the Valencian master: sometimes a figure is painted twice because Sorolla understood that the whole composition had to revolve around it.
The condition of the sketches is excellent thanks to the fact that the only trip they made in their lifetime, in 2015, had to be restored thanks to a Bancaja project, and only then, after their restoration, they were exhibited in Valencia before to return to the Hispanic Society fort, where unfortunately they are usually stored as the building does not have space to display all the art within.
AN ORDER THAT HAS ENDED ITS LIFE
The Valencian painter knew that Huntington’s commission would “eat up the best years of his life” as he wrote at the time, but he couldn’t refuse it: the magnate paid him $150,000 for the work, or the equivalent of $5 million in today’s exchange, and they were also going to be displayed with full honors in a special room that became known as the “Sorolla room”.
At the beginning of what will be his great work, Sorolla has a totalizing intention -recalls Burke-, he wants to put everything on a canvas: people with their different dresses, parties, food, animals and even light -not for nothing calls him “the painter of light” -, which produced somewhat heterogeneous and unnatural scenes, as is the case in the region of Castile.
Then Sorolla changed his mind and when he arrived in Andalusia or the Levant, he recorded specific moments like a bullfight or the arrival of the boats at the market, which had a more naturalistic aspect.
It is striking that neither Madrid, Barcelona nor Bilbao, the three great cities of the time and symbols of modernity, appear in the whole series: after all, Sorolla already depicts a rural Spain in the process of disappearing, and its ” Vision of Spain” represents the document of this idealized Spain.
But, as Burke reminds us, the Spain of Sorolla was not that of the Generation of 98, that of the painter Ignacio Zuloaga and of so many pessimistic poets, but a festive Spain. He explains it himself: “In my travels – of which I shaped the sketches – I discovered the whole truth, which is far from being the sad note that has invaded our art and our literature. It depends on the artists. sick, not our people”. EFE
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