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Spain has never been quite European: it lies on the Continent's fringe, isolated from outside influences. Its culture has thrived in a bubble. That heritage is brought to vibrant life in a grand show at New York's Guggenheim Museum. "Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History" (through March 28) gathers five centuries of Spanish art in an unprecedented overview, compiling 140 works by Spain's greatest painters, including El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, as well as famed expatriates Picasso, Miró and Dalí and lesser-known native masters who form a vital part of the country's artistic mainstream.
Spanish art is unique in reflecting not the secular humanism of the European Renaissance but a somber Christian world view--moral, religious, spiritual. In this thematically arranged show, still lifes, for example, found under the category bodegones (derived from bodega, or pantry), are infused with dark Christian overtones, painted against black backgrounds hinting at mortality and decay. Paintings of women are divided into "women in public," "weeping women," "virgins and mothers" and "ladies," reflecting the diverse, almost ambivalent way they were viewed during Spain's antihumanistic Counter-Reformation. Peculiarly Spanish, too, are the sections devoted to "knights and ghosts" and "monsters"--typically dwarfs or other "grotesques" used in the royal court for diversion.
"Monks" boast their own category because they influenced all life, many as patrons of art. The figures in "Children" are depicted with adult features, since childhood was viewed as dangerously close to original sin and brute nature. The landscapes and nudes, two common genres in all art, surprise with their own religious context, dominated by visions of other worlds. It's as if the Renaissance never came to postmedieval Spain.
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And yet the brooding intensity of El Greco, the warm humanity of Velázquez, the minute, often sardonic, details of Goya set these works firmly in the realm of great world art even as they create a distinct national tradition. The show emphasizes the intergenerational thread of this tradition by pairing great works by Spaniards from different eras.Velázquez's 17th-century "Needlewoman" is set beside Picasso's Blue Period "Woman Ironing." Both depict lower-class women, bending intensely over their work, hands and fingers focused in the foreground, but are done in contrasting colors--Velázquez favors warm tones while Picasso uses cold blues and harsh blacks.
This format makes clear how much Picasso has absorbed from his Spanish predecessors. Goya's 1793 "Pass With a Cape" is balanced against Picasso's 1933 "Bullfight: Death of the Toreador"--the archetypal bullfight standing for the ancient sacrificial spilling of blood. Similarly, Goya's "Still Life With Sheep's Head" is echoed by Picasso's "Still Life With Sheep's Skull"--the head and the skull symbolize death and mortality.
The integral connections between Spain's old masters and its modern artists have never been so clearly delineated as in this pairing of seemingly disparate works. El Greco's 17th-century "Vision of Saint John" depicts the Biblical story in a deeply religious way, with its huge, blue, emotionally charged figure of Saint John dominating the left foreground and long, slim, luminous spirits crowding all the remaining space. The dark angular trees and brilliantly illuminated cubist houses of Picasso's 1950 "Winter Landscape" pay formal homage to El Greco's "Vision." And Dalí, in his "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee ... " (1944), echoes El Greco's mysticism in his Freudian dream landscape--an evocation in bright pastel colors strikingly different from El Greco's shadowy darkness.
Beyond the historical value of the exhibit, curated by the Guggenheim's Carmen Giménez and former Prado director Francisco Calvo Serraller, the beauty of this show lies in the pure pleasure it affords. For visitors to Frank Lloyd Wright's whorled rotunda, it is like walking through a history of Spain's distinctive culture, told only in masterpieces.
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