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The Spanish Grand Masters: Velázquez, El Greco, Goya
The Spanish Grand Masters: Velázquez, El Greco, Goya
POSTED OCT 10, 2018
Before Picasso, Dalí, and Miró burst on the scene in the twentieth century, Spain had a rich artistic tradition. Diego Velázquez, "El Greco", and Francisco Goya are the most renowned of these earlier painters - a triumvirate of Grand Masters whose work extends from the late Renaissance through the Romantic period. While their paintings are exhibited in museums around the world, the Prado in Madrid, which celebrates its bicentennial next year, has a great collection of each of their paintings. Museo del Prado holds 79 paintings by Velázquez; 42 by El Greco, and an astounding 931 by Goya, whose statue is outside the main entrance. If Madrid is not in your travel plans, many museums in the US have works by these painters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, has large collections of paintings by El Greco and Goya.
Before Picasso, Dalí, and Miró burst on the scene in the twentieth century, Spain had a rich artistic tradition. Diego Velázquez, "El Greco", and Francisco Goya are the most renowned of these earlier painters - a triumvirate of Grand Masters whose work extends from the late Renaissance through the Romantic period. While their paintings are exhibited in museums around the world, the Prado in Madrid, which celebrates its bicentennial next year, has a great collection of each of their paintings. Museo del Prado holds 79 paintings by Velázquez; 42 by El Greco, and an astounding 931 by Goya, whose statue is outside the main entrance. If Madrid is not in your travel plans, many museums in the US have works by these painters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, has large collections of paintings by El Greco and Goya.
El Greco
El Greco
Domenikos Theotokopoulos , known in his adopted country of Spain as "El Greco", was born around 1541 in Crete, which was then part of the Republic of Venice. In his mid-twenties, he traveled to Venice and studied under Titian, the most renowned painter of his day and famous for the richness and intensity of his colors. Around age 35, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, producing his best-known paintings. His works from this period are seen as precursors of both Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Impressionism. He is remembered chiefly for his elongated, tortured figures, often religious in nature, the style of which baffled his contemporaries but helped establish his reputation in the years to come. El Greco died on April 7, 1614, unappreciated in his time, with the art world waiting 250 years before embracing his status as a master. [1]
Domenikos Theotokopoulos , known in his adopted country of Spain as "El Greco", was born around 1541 in Crete, which was then part of the Republic of Venice. In his mid-twenties, he traveled to Venice and studied under Titian, the most renowned painter of his day and famous for the richness and intensity of his colors. Around age 35, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, producing his best-known paintings. His works from this period are seen as precursors of both Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Impressionism. He is remembered chiefly for his elongated, tortured figures, often religious in nature, the style of which baffled his contemporaries but helped establish his reputation in the years to come. El Greco died on April 7, 1614, unappreciated in his time, with the art world waiting 250 years before embracing his status as a master. [1]
Right: The Opening of the Fifth Seal (completed in 1614. in particular, went on to spark great debate, as it has been suggested that it was an influence on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, often considered the first cubist painting. [1] The painting is a fragment from a large altarpiece commissioned for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. It depicts a passage in the Bible, Revelation (6:9-11) describing the opening of the Fifth Seal at the end of time, and the distribution of white robes to "those who had been slain for the work of God and for the witness they had borne." The missing upper part may have shown the Sacrificial Lamb opening the Fifth Seal. The canvas was an iconic work for twentieth-century artists and Picasso, who knew it in Paris, used it as an inspiration for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. [2]
Velázquez
Velázquez
Last year's exhibition of Velázquez portraits at the Met was titled "Truth in Painting." Velázquez (1599-1660) was profoundly impressed by Caravaggio, the Italian Renaissance painter noted for his "naturalism". Like Caravaggio, he copied nature faithfully without concern for conventions and without trying to create an idealized beauty. [3]
Last year's exhibition of Velázquez portraits at the Met was titled "Truth in Painting." Velázquez (1599-1660) was profoundly impressed by Caravaggio, the Italian Renaissance painter noted for his "naturalism". Like Caravaggio, he copied nature faithfully without concern for conventions and without trying to create an idealized beauty. [3]
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, famous modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.[4]
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, famous modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.[4]
Left: his most famous work, "Las Meninas" (1656), Museo del Prado, Madrid. "Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting." The young Margaret Theresa surrounded by her ladies in waiting , a dwarf, a chaperone, a bodyguard and a dog is in the foreground. The King and Queen are visible in a mirror at the back. Velázquez paints himself working on a large easel. An example of baroque art, it has been called "theology of painting" and the "philosophy of art", so decidedly capable of producing its desired effect. [4]
Goya
Goya
Francisco Goya (1746 -1828) was a Spanish painter of the romantic era. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. [4] In the late 1770's, he created a series of tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory before being given a salaried position as painter to Charles III. Then in 1789, Goya was appointed court painter to Charles IV and earned commissions from the Spanish nobility. Gombrich writes of his portraits, "...Goya seems to have known no pity. He made their features reveal all their vanity and ugliness, their greed and emptiness. No Court Painter before or after has ever left such a record of his patrons." [3]
Francisco Goya (1746 -1828) was a Spanish painter of the romantic era. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. [4] In the late 1770's, he created a series of tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory before being given a salaried position as painter to Charles III. Then in 1789, Goya was appointed court painter to Charles IV and earned commissions from the Spanish nobility. Gombrich writes of his portraits, "...Goya seems to have known no pity. He made their features reveal all their vanity and ugliness, their greed and emptiness. No Court Painter before or after has ever left such a record of his patrons." [3]
Some time between late 1792 and early 1793 an undiagnosed illness left Goya deaf. He became withdrawn and introspective while the direction and tone of his work changed. He began the series of aquatinted etchings, published in 1799 as the Caprichos. The visions in these prints are partly explained by the caption on one of them: "The sleep of reason produces monsters". Art historians have noted Goya's singular ability to express his personal demons as horrific and fantastic imagery that speaks universally, and allows his audience to find its own catharsis in the images. The French army invaded Spain in 1808, leading to the Peninsular War of 1808–1814. During this time, he painted scenes of the tragedy of war including The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, and prepared the series of etchings later known as The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra). Although Goya did not make his intention known when creating "The Disasters of War", art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War and the move against liberalism in the aftermath of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. The scenes are singularly disturbing, sometimes macabre in their depiction of battlefield horror, and represent an outraged conscience in the face of death and destruction. They were not published until 1863, 35 years after his death. [4]
Some time between late 1792 and early 1793 an undiagnosed illness left Goya deaf. He became withdrawn and introspective while the direction and tone of his work changed. He began the series of aquatinted etchings, published in 1799 as the Caprichos. The visions in these prints are partly explained by the caption on one of them: "The sleep of reason produces monsters". Art historians have noted Goya's singular ability to express his personal demons as horrific and fantastic imagery that speaks universally, and allows his audience to find its own catharsis in the images. The French army invaded Spain in 1808, leading to the Peninsular War of 1808–1814. During this time, he painted scenes of the tragedy of war including The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, and prepared the series of etchings later known as The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra). Although Goya did not make his intention known when creating "The Disasters of War", art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War and the move against liberalism in the aftermath of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. The scenes are singularly disturbing, sometimes macabre in their depiction of battlefield horror, and represent an outraged conscience in the face of death and destruction. They were not published until 1863, 35 years after his death. [4]
Above left: Charles IV of Spain and his family, 1800
Left: The Third of May of 1808, 1814
In 1824, when the failure of an attempt to establish a liberal government had led to renewed persecution, Goya applied for permission to go to France for reasons of health. After visiting Paris he settled in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, where he remained, apart from a brief trip to Madrid, until his death. Goya was a revolutionary artist. His enormous and varied production of paintings, drawings, and engravings, relating to nearly every aspect of contemporary life, reflects the period of political and social upheavals in which he lived. He had no immediate followers, but his many original achievements profoundly impressed later 19th-century French artists—Eugène Delacroix was one of his great admirers—who were the leaders of new European movements, from Romanticism and Realism to Impressionism; and his works continued to be admired and studied by the Expressionists and Surrealists in the 20th and 21st centuries. [5]
In 1824, when the failure of an attempt to establish a liberal government had led to renewed persecution, Goya applied for permission to go to France for reasons of health. After visiting Paris he settled in voluntary exile in Bordeaux, where he remained, apart from a brief trip to Madrid, until his death. Goya was a revolutionary artist. His enormous and varied production of paintings, drawings, and engravings, relating to nearly every aspect of contemporary life, reflects the period of political and social upheavals in which he lived. He had no immediate followers, but his many original achievements profoundly impressed later 19th-century French artists—Eugène Delacroix was one of his great admirers—who were the leaders of new European movements, from Romanticism and Realism to Impressionism; and his works continued to be admired and studied by the Expressionists and Surrealists in the 20th and 21st centuries. [5]
Left: The Colossus, 1808
CREDITS AND REFERENCES
All images are from Wikimedia and in the public domain.
[1] biography.com
[2] Metropolitan Museum of Art
[3] E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
[4] adapted from Wikipedia entries
Joan Miró, Surrealist pioneer and lifelong experimentalist
Joan Miró, Surrealist pioneer and lifelong experimentalist
POSTED FEBRUARY 16, 2021
"The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later." - Joan Miró
"The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later." - Joan Miró
Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, a contemporary and friend of Pablo Picasso. Where Picasso was one of the founders of Cubism, Miró was a pioneer of Surrealism. Miró was a bold experimentalist, and his radically, inventive style was a critical contributor to the early-20th-century avant-garde's journey toward abstraction. Although Miró is associated with early Surrealism and has had an influence on Abstract Expressionists, he remains one of modern art's greatest mavericks with a visual vocabulary unmistakably his own. [1]
The MoMA video [sidebar] takes a look at Miró's creative process through the eyes of his grandson and MoMA curator Anne Umland.
Like other artists in the rapidly changing art scene of the twentieth century, Joan Miró's style developed through several phases. His earliest works favored the Post-Impressionists and Fauves, and these paintings were characterized by vivid, brushy landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Around the time of his first solo exhibition in 1918, he began to focus more on line, form, and structure. His paintings were now informed by the folk art and Romanesque frescoes of the “Catalan primitives.” [2]
"The Farm"
A few years after Miró's 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he moved in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents' summer home and farm in Montroig del Camp. One such painting, "The Farm", showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain Catalan nationalistic qualities. Ernest Hemingway, who later purchased the piece, compared the artistic accomplishment to James Joyce's Ulysses and described it by saying, "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there."
Miró’s encounter with the Paris avant-garde would bring more modern influences to bear on his work, as seen in "The Farm" (1921), a semi-realistic, semi-Cubist rendering of his childhood home. "The Farm" was executed over a period of nine months as Miró shuttled between the parental farm at Montroig, Barcelona and Paris. Miró’s love of the early Catalan painters is recognizable in his painstaking attention to each leaf on the tree and furrow in the soil, while his relationship with Cubism can be seen in the way he flattens the otherwise linear space of the composition with geometric forms and stretches of unmodulated pigment. Miró later said of the painting that it was "the summary of one period of my work, but also the point of departure for what was to follow.” [2,3, 4]
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33296108
In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró's work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group. He experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.
Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró would return to Spain in the summers. Once the war began, he was unable to return home. Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work. Though a sense of (Catalan) nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes, it was not until Spain's Republican government commissioned him to paint a mural for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró's work took on a politically charged meaning. His most famous painting from this time is "Still Life with Shoe."
"Still Life with Old Shoe"
Created in the context of the Spanish Civil War, "Still Life with Old Shoe" (1937) is sometimes compared with Picasso's "Guernica." Miró was living in Paris at the time and the work is thus "an exile’s meditation on war and loss, a dark poem in a dark time." The nightmarish background echoes Miró's anguish, despair and fear over the civil war while symbolically depicting the tragic consequences of any war. The main colors are black, red and acidic yellow, which symbolize an apocalyptic landscape. The shapes in the horizon look like dark clouds, forecasting the tragedy to come. On the left there is an apple impaled by a fork, then a bottle, a loaf of bread and the shoe of the title. He incorporated the old shoe in the picture as a gesture toward Van Gogh; he had the sense that his eye was bringing all the world's psychosis to everything on which it fell; the objects in the painting seem lit by a savage incandescence, the light comes from the direction of the artist. [5]
Continually experimenting with new concepts and new ways of "seeing", Joan Miró's art became more abstract, though never totally so, in the mid-20th century. He became internationally famous; his sculptures, drawings, and paintings were exhibited in many countries and he received commissions for murals and monumental sculptures.
Two of his most famous later works, Bleu II (1961) from the Bleu Triptych and the sculpture Moonbird (1966) are below.
"Bleu II"
Bleu II is the central piece of a triptych created by Joan Miró in 1961. It is a huge work with each of the three pieces measuring more than 3 meters by 2 meters. The color blue held great significance for Miró; to him blue was a symbol of a world of cosmic dreams, an unconscious state where his mind flowed clearly and without any sort of order. This blue was the color of a surreal, ethereal night, a night that embodied the only place where dreams could exist in their rawest state, untouched and uncensored by conscious, rational thought.
Miro's interest in empty spaces is compelling, especially when presented in a way that seems inventive so many years after the painting was completed.
While he was working on the Triptych, he was quoted saying “The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge, empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains—everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”
Bleu II could be a wide blue sky at dusk or a wide ocean under the sunlight. The openness of the painting along with its simplicity gives viewers breathing room to bring their own interpretation to the canvas alongside the rich colors and unusual forms. [3, 6]
Painting was just one of the media in which Joan Miró created his masterpieces. He was sculptor and a ceramacist as well.
Miro's work in sculpture developed over time, with his most ambitious pieces not arriving until he was in his fifties. Miró turned to sculpture in the 1940s, feeling as he said, "It is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters; what I do in painting is more conventional." He would continue to work productively in this medium into his eighties and always felt that there were new ideas and techiques to experiment with and to learn from. His work with different media grew organically where he would develop ideas and produce visual languages which could be reused on multiple occasions and sometimes repeated across different materials. [7,8]
"Lunar Bird"
This large bronze statue was first designed by Joan Miró in the 1940s but cast in its final version in 1966. At this time Miró had become fascinated with cosmic themes and the relationship between the earth and sky. Birds had also become a recurring theme in his work, no doubt perceived as a connection between the celestial and terrestrial. [9]
The sculpture depicts a hybrid creature, its face and horns quarter-moon- or crescent-shaped, while its two arms resemble the arc of wings. Its squat horizontal torso with two limbs firmly planted has a primal power, as if drawing strength from the earth. The many hornlike shapes not only evoke crescent moons and birds, but the tradition of Spanish bullfighting. The work becomes a powerful totem, as art historian Carmen Fernández Aparicio wrote, "Miró brought together metaphorical mineral forms and ideas from the natural and cosmic world to create a strange, hybrid character, a sort of monster with a shining, polished surface." [8]
Sculpture allowed Miró to embody his long-time preoccupations, as here, the moon, the bird, and the theme of Catalonia, fused into one iconic and idiosyncratic three-dimensional form. He molded the works by hand, as this work, created in 1946-49, shows in its soft contours and sensitive modeling. As a result, the work seems to have sprung out of the natural world, resembling an organic form that has taken shape in dark shining metal. In the 1960s, he enlarged the original model to make casts of the work, which can be found in museums and sculptural parks throughout the world. [8]
For more about Joan Miró and, in particular, the latter years of his career, UNC-TV prepared a documentary on the 2014-2015 exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Duke University: "Miró: The Experience of Seeing." [below]
Sources: [1] The Art Story -1 [2] artsy.net [3] Wikipedia [4] joanmiro.com [5] joan-miro.net [6] joanmiropaintings.org - 1 [7] joanmiropaintings.org - 2 [8] The Art Story - 2
[9] Culture Trip
Image Credits from top: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33296108; https://www.joan-miro.net/images/paintings/still-life-with-old-shoe.jpg; https://www.joan-miro.net/blue.jsp#prettyPhoto; Simona Natoli (Instagram photo used at https://mymodernmet.com/joan-miro-art/)
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