Maybe we take too many things for granted. Some (increasingly, too many) are either busy demolishing what cost so much effort to build or have no problem exchanging it for a few more crumbs of power. In case logic doesn’t work for you, art also, with aesthetic hammer blows, reminds us that Spain was not always as we know it now.
A splendid exhibition at the Prado Museum focuses on a particularly significant era for these purposes. Art and social transformations in Spain (1885-1910) occupies the entire Jerónimos building (1,400 square meters) with 300 works, some of them in spectacular format.
Illustrious painters of the social genre such as Joaquín Sorolla, Darío de Regoyos, Isidro Nonell or Antonio Fillol, and also geniuses who dealt with it more tangentially, such as Pablo Picasso, give strength to the exhibition from a purely artistic point of view. However, all works, even the most humble photography, accumulate intensity to point in one direction: the perception of an era, its sensitivity, its injustices and hopes, denunciation and desire, a heartbeat.
The tumultuous Spanish 19th century reached a definitive milestone in 1885 with the death of Alfonso XII. His widow María Cristina develops a brittle regency just at the moment when Late industrialization shows its effects in the form of drastic social changes. Art attends the spectacle in factories, cities, fields… In love with its expressive force, he abandons his previous predilection for history. A new genre, the social one, is imposed on the imagination.
The El Prado exhibition gives an account of the phenomenon in an articulated tour based on sections that deal with the most relevant topics from two angles: In the larger spaces he accumulates painting and sculpture, while in the smaller ones, as a cabinetsbrings together graphic arts (drawing, watercolor, etching, lithography), with the very broad presence of photography. A screening at the end of the exhibition deals with cinema, which was born in 1895 with an undisguisedly social vocation.
Industry and child labor
So, Work in the field It is approached with large scenes that include life-size figures, sometimes arranged in triptychs, as in the slightly idealized work of Enrique Martínez Cubells, or with the easy strokes of Joaquín Sorolla or the impressive darkness suggested by Darío de Regoyos. Meanwhile, in the office, Iturrino’s graphic work details the harshness of the landscape or the suffering of the animals, and the photography mixes the bucolism of an Arturo Truan with the more objective treatment of Francisco Hernández-Rubio.
In Work at seaSorolla takes an obvious leading role. Faced with the drama of his predecessors, he claims a naturalism chiseled by light to dignify the task.; perspective that is completed in the corresponding cabinet with some anonymous photographs from the Sorolla Museum with scenes very similar to those painted by the Valencian. Another of the great attractions of this section is the portrait, with a fascinating study of sailor types by Mateo Inurria.
One of the most impressive sections, especially in large format works, is Work in the industryto. There are heartbreaking images, such as the representation of child labor in looms and forges by Santiago Rusiñol, while Darío de Regoyos surrenders to the new forms that arise from human ingenuity with bright colors and direct brushstrokes. The sculpture, with Pablo Gargallo at the helm, here acquires a paradoxically majestic dimension in its simplification, perhaps a preview of the excesses that socialist aesthetics would bring. In the office, photography occupies a central role, but there is also room for genius in techniques such as etching, with which Ricardo Baroja brings out all the aesthetic power of the asphalt workers’ work.
Later, the section Work accidents accounts for the price in blood of daily wages. The expressive They still say fish is expensive! by Joaquín Sorolla or A disgraceby José Jiménez Aranda, for example, they illustrate it with serene objectivity. From tragedy emerges anger, which takes form in Strike and social demands, whose epic is reported by Vicente Cutanda, José Uría, Lluís Graner and Antonio Fillol. In the cabinet, the portraits that Rusiñol made of the anarchists who attacked the Liceo stand out.
Illness and emigration
Swirling around the new social forms brought about by industrialization, themes such as Ewomen’s work either The religion. The dawn of female emancipation or the contrast of tradition in a different context excite the imagination of authors such as José Gutiérrez, Regoyos, José Ortiz Echagüe, Evaristo Valle…
Other sections, such as Disease and medicine They collect interesting testimonies about advances in vaccination and hygiene, in addition to portraying the figure of the doctor and heartbreaking notes such as the one addressed in the sculpture The degenerates by Carles Mani or as curious as those of the symbolist posters designed by Ramón Casas to prevent syphilis.
In the suburbs of productive activity, the squalor of prostitution It is a source of inspiration for the talent of Sorolla, Zuloaga, Antonio Fillol, Gonzalo Bilbao, Julio Romero de Torres and Pablo Picasso. And beyond, overflowing the horizon, The emigration portrays the flow of travelers –In the last decade of the 19th century, up to 400,000 Spaniards moved to America– with monumental paintings and sad photographs of family farewells.
Migratory movements acquire their full meaning with the section Poverty and ethnic and social marginalization. Colonialism. Isidre Nonell, for example, breaks with the romantic stereotype of gypsies to focus on their misery. Sorolla, Gutiérrez Solana and Ricardo Baroja force us to look into the eyes of the marginalized, and the Filipino Domingo Teotico gives voice to the suffering of local ethnic groups. Faced with this dark reality, The education tries to exert its influence in a population with 71% illiteracy.
A major exhibition, in short, both for the accumulated material and for the ambition of its theme and structure. Aesthetic fruition and memory so that emotion tells us what we were and what we are: changing forms in search of a channel that expresses them.
