Unlike other painters who found in their own faces a material worth exploring, perhaps motivated by vanity or interested in the mark that time left on their bodies, Manuel González Santos (Seville, 1875-1949) cultivated the self-portrait on rare occasions, as an anomaly in his production. There are numerous characters that he immortalized in his works, among them Cardinal Spínola, Alfonso XIII, Luis Montoto or his disciple Carmen Laffonprofiles in which he turned a clean and conscientious look at the human figure, but the master avoided exposing himself and chose discretion as a way of being in the world.
In one of the unusual prints in which he became the protagonist and was captured while still young, when he was entering his thirties, this reserve of his character can be seen: a restrained expression presides over his countenance, and next to his silhouette the back of a canvas stands out above all the traits of his character his status as an artist or craftsman. The oil painting, dated 1907, is part of the catalog of The century of the portrait. Collections of the Prado Museum, an exhibition that says goodbye to the Caixafórum Sevilla this Sunday.
Adela Perea, granddaughter of González Santos, remembers her grandfather as “a quiet person. He died when I was nine years old, but in my memory he appears as a balanced and homely man. I didn’t think about it then, because I was a girl, but over time I have concluded that he had a certain shyness,” says this graduate in History who published a monograph about her relative in the Seville Art collection of the Provincial Council of Seville. In it, the researcher focuses on the prudence of an artist who “he avoids treatment from the press, he does not seek the favor of critics. With a withdrawn character and little social life – although with pleasant conversation and solid friendships – he is not very fond of social gatherings and at work he also tries to remain independent, outside of groups; “Before anything else he prefers to take refuge in his study,” Perea writes in his book.
It was not González Santos, the granddaughter points out during a visit to the Caixafórum exhibition, a hermit who created with his back to the world. “He gathered friends and students at his house,” adds Perea, before underlining the many occupations that the artist carried out and that kept him in contact with the society of his time: he was director of the School of Arts and Crafts and academic of Santa Isabel de Hungary, president of the Fine Arts Section of the Ateneo de Sevilla and director of the Fine Arts and Sciences sections. of Public Instruction at the Ibero-American Exposition.
“He was valued during his lifetime and then practically forgotten,” laments Perea, who recommends looking at his ancestor “without any cliché, freely, removing him from the knowledge of small groups, from that partial oblivion, and making him known for what he is, a painter.” endowed with a very particular style, his own style, with a powerful sensitivity”. In his scenes of manners and landscapes they coexist the remains of the classics, the light of the impressionists, a sensitivity that pursues beauty above all. “In the evaluation that his work has had, it also happened with other references of Sevillian painting such as Gonzalo Bilbao or Jiménez Aranda, the emergence of the avant-garde weighed heavily, which cornered what they did. I get the impression,” Perea weighs, ” that in France they would be studying his works with interest, his legacy would be treated differently”.
The century of the portrait also exhibits a Mortuary portrait of a son of the artistmade around 1906. According to the poster that accompanies this work, “the painter González Santos often used pastel, given the special delicacy of this technique for portraiture, which here reflects the lifeless body of a child . The gender post mortem “In its children’s version it had a great development in Alfonsine Spain as a reminder of common losses at the time, when the mortality rates of the little ones were still very high.”
Faced with this portrait, Perea returns to that modesty that characterized his grandfather: “I don’t know what that child would die of, at home they didn’t talk about it. As you get older you understand that this happens often: when you are curious about the past, There are no longer those who can answer you”, confesses the expert, who also wrote the catalog of the exhibition that the Villasís room dedicated to González Santos in 1989. The family found a box with photographs of the baby and in them it can be seen that the painter He was also faithful to reality in this work. “Only the part of the mouth is different,” explains Perea about this cake that, despite the drama of its subject, exudes the serenity and love for beauty that guided the artist. González Santos revives his son with the same restraint with which in the rest of his production he will capture other figures, which he usually portrays with an absent air and an austere emotion. That sobriety with which he poses, dressed in black in front of a dark background, his face illuminated, in the other self-portrait of the painter that he keeps the Fine Arts of Sevilleand in which its protagonist looks ahead with a discreet firmness, as if he knew the secret of elegance.
