A selection from the enormous and valuable BBVA collection, which now reaches the figure of 9,000 workstakes shape annually in an exhibition proposal at the headquarters of the historic building in Bilbao. This year’s, curated by Pablo González Tornel, director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, with the title Classic and modern. Masterpieces from the BBVA Collection.
The exhibition hosts thirty-nine works by thirty-seven artistsinscribed in a historical arc that goes from the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century. With an expanded format, this exhibition will be presented later at the institution directed by González.
Given the ambition of the purpose and the spatial limitations, the curator offers a segmented and synthetic reading of the evolution of painting in a display of genres and conventions through relevant artists such as Josefa de Óbidos, Ramón Casas, Francisco de GoyaJuan Pantoja de la Cruz, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Anton van Dyck, Joaquín Sorolla or Ignacio Zuloaga.
The formal link that links them is the figurative realism that emerged in Flanders and Italy at the beginning of the 16th century and that would manifest itself through new configurations until the first modern avant-garde.
The exhibition is structured in three sections: The time of kings and gods; The triumph of genres: landscapes, still lifes and customs; and The paths of modernity. With an informative desire and through genuine examples, a part of that history of painting is exposed in the Western European context that goes of the dissolution of classicismwhich begins in the Renaissance, until the various modern emergencies.
Francisco de Goya, ‘Charles III Hunter’, 1787-1788. Photo: David Mecha
In the first section you already realize the power of art for the creation of social imaginary meaningsat the service of political and religious powers. All European dynasties used the portrait as a sublimating representation and, in the case of Spain, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons paid outstanding attention to being portrayed in an ideal way.
The mythologized courtly image was fixed, sometimes with a ironic tensionin Velázquez’s canvases or in portraits included in the exhibition such as Felipe II1605, by Pantoja de la Cruz; Charles II, 1674, by Juan Carreño de Miranda; either Charles III hunter, 1787, by Goya.
The emergence of new bourgeois estates and lineages would also have its reflection in the portrait genrelike the lavish ones painted by Mierevelt, Portrait of a Knight, y Lady Portraitboth from 1609, in the Flemish context. The portrait is also relevant Don Pantaleón Pérez de Nenín, 1808, signed by Francisco de Goya.
When the portrait becomes a self-portrait we find an admirable case in the painting of Corneille de Lyon: Portrait of young gentleman1535. The genre of religious painting, so prominent in the Renaissance and Baroque to provide new figures of the Christian imagination are present with outstanding works.
The exhibition offers a synthetic reading of the evolution of painting through figurative realism
Like the holy familyfrom 1620, by Valentin de Boulogne; Saint Joseph with the childpainted between 1650-1660, by Murillo; Christ and the adulterous woman1620-1622, by Van Dyck and holy family1660, by Josefa de Óbidos, an outstanding artist of Portuguese baroque naturalism.
In the second itinerary of the exhibition we find the extension, at the end of the 16th century in Flanders and Holland, from genres to traditional scenes, landscapes and still lifes that are linked to historical-social changes and the emergence of a new art market.
Josefa de Óbidos, ‘Sagrada familia’, 1660. Photo: David Mecha
He naturalism and realism They found unprecedented drifts in the scenes of Rubens, Jordaens and Van Dyck, in the floral compositions of Jan Philip van Thielen, in the allegorical landscapes of Jan Brueghel or Jan Wildens.
The third section focuses on the journeys of a social and artistic modernity driven by the liberal revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1868 and social movements. All of this accelerates the crisis of classicism and its metaphysical and normative ideals.
The realism of Raimundo de Madrazo, Carlos de Haes, Ramón Martí i Alsina, Francisco Domingo Marqués and Joaquín Sorolla found vernacular and cosmopolitan resonances. The latter, referenced in Paris, had their influence on painters such as Ramón Casas, Joan Llimona or Santiago Rusiñol present in the BBVA exhibition.
Like Francisco Iturrino is with his accent fawnValentín de Zubiaurre with his paradigmatic costumbrismo, Aurelio Artera and his figurative innovation, Darío de Regoyos with his modern celebration of the landscape and the protean Zuloaga, a notable figure who synthesizes the tragic and existentialist tradition of Spanish painting.
His famous Portrait of Mr. Halley-Schmidt, 1923, epitome of modern landscape representation and the power of the new elites. It could be said that it looks to the past and leaves room for new promises of the present and the future.
This exhibition allows diverse audiences to dialogue with works and artists which, over almost five centuries, participate in the canonical history of European painting.
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