Dwarfs, Nudes, and Saints: A Panorama of Spanish Art

Above: Juan Pantoja de la Cruz: The Infantes Don Felipe and Doña Ana (1607), oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie. Below: Pablo Picasso: Two Seated Children (Claude and Paloma) (1950), oil and enamel on plywood, private collection, courtesy Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie, Geneva. (© Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York)

The question that reverberates throughout the Guggenheim Museum these days is: What do five centuries of Spanish art have in common? The breathtaking show, titled "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso, Time, Truth, and History," comprises about 140 works. Its two curators, Francisco Calvo Serraller, former director of Madrid's renowned Prado Museum, and Carmen Gimenez, curator of 20th-century painting at the Guggenheim, have worked both separately and jointly on many exhibitions of Spanish art. It took them about seven years to put the current show together.

Unlike most previous panoramic shows, this one does not proceed chronologically but, rather, is divided into 15 sections, each one based on a theme that runs through all the previous five centuries of art in Spain. In the section on portraiture, for instance, a 16th-century El Greco portrait, a 17th-century one by Velasquez, a Goya, a Picasso, and a Miró hang side by side, and the curators challenge us to compare and contrast these masters in a new context.

The underlying premise is that Spanish art from these different eras possesses something essential in common. Spain, because of its isolation until recent years, has had its own unique history. In painting, this can be summed up as a realistic, anti-classical one, stressing naturalism, often to the point of brutality and weirdness. We certainly observe these characteristics in the truthful vision of El Greco, the magnificent homeliness of Velasquez's portraits of the Hapsburg family and their dwarf servants, Zurbarán's young country girls posing as saints, and Picasso, Dali, and Miró's grotesqueries. Only in the 19th century, with the advent of Romanticism and Realism in France, especially Manet, did Spanish painting from previous eras become internationally known. For me, the 17th-century artists in the show trump all the others.

Here I must add a personal note. I spent my junior year abroad in Paris many years ago, studying at the École du Louvre, where I took a course in 17th-century Spanish painting (known in Spanish as the Siglo d'Oro, or the Century of Gold). My professor, Maurice Serullaz, merely touched on the more famous painters—Velasquez, Murillo, and Ribera—but spent the preponderance of his time on Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), then unknown to me.

The paintings of Zurbarán begin this exhibition, and set the tone. First there is a trussed, snow-white lamb (or perhaps a ram), lying helpless on the edge of a gray ledge, surrounded by darkness. Even without its label, Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God (1636-40), we sense something supernatural and proto-surreal about it. To call it disconcerting would be an understatement.

Moving up the ramp, just beyond the separate gallery, another Zurbarán, the Still Life With Four Vessels, echoes the lamb—but instead of a living animal, it presents us with three inanimate pottery vessels and a metallic cup. The master meticulously arranged these on a severe, horizontal table edge, surrounded by darkness, but inexplicably lit with a bright light.

Above: Diego Velásquez: Don Sebastián de Morra (1643–44), oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (Photo © 2006 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid ) Below: Pablo Picasso: El Bobo, After Velázquez and Murillo (1959),  oil and enamel on canvas, private collection. (© Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Beatrice Hatala)

Inside the gallery we see Zurbarán's masterpiece, St. Hugh (1655), bracketed on the right by his dark, shadowy St. Francis of Assisi in His Tomb (1630-34), and on the left by the primarily white hues of the Carthusian monk, Brother Pedro Machado (1633). The large center painting, predominantly white and gray, contains a few colors in the painting-within-the-painting above the monks. Zurbarán, who lived with monks, portrays them with deep and perceptive knowledge.

Continuing up the ramp we see the bodegones or "kitchen scenes," similar to, yet slightly different from, still lifes in other nations. Here Zurbarán is joined by Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), Juan van der Hamen (1596-1631), and Antonio de Pereda (1611-78), as well as compatriots from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The 17th-century painters have always seemed to me proto-surreal—or at least "magic realists." They sweep me in, and I find myself transfixed. The Picassos and Juan Gris nearby reflect something of the same spirit, but it is the 17th-century artists that I will not forget.

Higher up (literally) in the Guggenheim, displays of portraiture feature Velazquez's Queen Mariana (c. 1656), she of the Hapsburg dimwitted look and weak chin, next to Goya's Duchess Abrantes, 1816, and Picasso's Marie Thérèse Walter of 1937. All three have elaborate hairdos, Marianna's topped with an ostrich feather, and the duchess and Marie-Thérèse wearing crowns of flowers. This comparison provides a welcome chuckle. Throughout the museum, Velasquez and Zurbarán shine, while Picasso, Dali, and Miró are merely interesting.

The sections on religious scenes of various kinds as well as mothers, virgins, and children were interesting and convincing, but the section titled "Freaks" stood out as most perturbing and strange. The weighty catalog accompanying the show discusses in detail the Spanish fascination for "monstros." The Hapsburg rulers in Spain famously had dwarves as servants; Velasquez's sympathetic treatment of them, including Don Sebastian de Mora, c. 1643-44, borrowed from the Prado, prefigure Goya and later painters. Juan Carreño de Miranda's portraits of an obese 6-year-old girl, known as "La Monstrua," both dressed and nude, were commissioned by Charles II in 1680. They are unforgettable, both in their grotesqueness and yet empathetic treatment. The authors suggest that these strange visions represent the other side of beauty; it is all humanity in its various guises.

The exhibition succeeds in convincing us that there is, indeed, something essentially "Spanish" in all these wide-ranging subjects and centuries. Indeed, Cubism and Surrealism were both pioneered by Spanish artists; though breaking with tradition in certain ways, these artists still had roots in older Spanish traditions in art.

Go to the Guggenheim to learn, but above all, go to see masterpieces rarely available, borrowed from all over, in the most comprehensive exhibition of Spanish painting ever seen in the United States. "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History" runs through March 28. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street).

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.