At 2;30pm on Saturday 21st September 2019, my brother, his new wife and my sister Avril picked us up in their car and brought us to the National Gallery of Ireland to see the Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida exhibition Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light. I had not gone out to an exhibition since March 2018, when I had seen Emil Nolde: Colour is Life also in the National Gallery of Ireland and frankly I had given up any real interest most art and all contemporary art. But as part of my daily rituals, I would scan the arts pages of the various newspapers only to despair at the endless left-wing lectures on the evils of Trump, Brexit and white heterosexual men in general as well as their constant thinly-veiled propaganda for; progressive socialism, fourth-wave feminism, MeToo, LGBTQ activists, multiculturalism, disability rights, eco-warriors, veganism, and women, women, women! Yet, virtually all this avalanche of politically simplistic activist art was talentless rubbish. It seemed to me that there was no more art left in art and all there was left was cynical socio-political brainwashing. And even if I may have supported many left-wing ambitions – I refused to accept the weaponization of art for political ends or such a naïve and partisan understanding of existence. So, apart from some wonderful exhibitions of Expressionism in New York’s Neue Galerie - I saw nothing I had any desire to see. I was left bewildered by how art had radically changed from Modernist and Post-Modern counterculture and transgression, freedom of expression and “live and let live” - into left-wing liberal “do as I say” totalitarian conformism and hypocritical corporate collaboration. Frankly, the millennials were as fanatical in their political correctness as the Victorians had been in their Christian bigotry and both were just as hypocritical and unrealistic. But while the Victorians might have spent a year painstakingly painting some morally uplifting self-righteous message, today, you were lucky if a millennial handed you a post-it note with a pitiful scrawl! Moreover, while the Victorians were restricted to giving moralist diatribes in churches, parliaments and rabble-rousing street protests today’s left-wing liberals can monitor the lives, behaviour and art of everyone through social media and troll those who offend them.
So, I was
fascinated to see the Sorolla exhibition because he was a star of an equally
conformist period in art history when the deplorables of today were in charge
and those they found deplorable were all those who would take over our decadent
and fragmented Western societies. Yet, what they all shared was a complete
intolerance of dissent or genuine free thinking and a merciless use of cant to
further their careers.
Sorolla was one
of the forgotten orphans of art history who had been hailed as “the greatest
living painter in the world” only to be written out of later texts. To
Modernist fanatics, painters like Sorolla were part of the bankrupt academic
system that the likes of Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse helped to overthrow. And
unlike many of the early Modernists who had to endured years, even decades of
rejection, ridicule, poverty and marginalisation - Sorolla’s life (apart from
being orphaned at age two and having a stroke that put an end to his painting
three years before his death) was free of trauma or tragedy. He was fêted as a
prodigy and then went on to win countless medals, awards, exhibitions and
public acclaim. He also was happily married with three beautiful children,
earned great wealth from his art and travelled extensively. So, like many
world-famous contemporary ‘genius’ artists today - who parrot left-wing liberal
clichés and make moralistic art to educate the poor and unwashed deplorables,
the way Sorolla and his peers used to parrot conservative and monarchist
clichés and made moralistic work to educate the poor, unwashed and immoral -
Sorolla’s ‘biography’ reads like one long list of grand exhibitions, triumphs
and tub-thumping declarations of profundity. During his 1908 exhibition at the
Grafton Galleries in London, the galley bombastically declared him “The World’s Greatest Living Painter” and few at the time would have doubted it. The
following year, at Sorolla’s exhibition in the Hispanic Society of America
around 160,000 people cued over the weeks, sometimes in the snow to see his
work, about half of the 356 paintings were sold and all the 20,000 catalogues
for the exhibition sold out! And by the end of his tour of America, Sorolla (in
an art market only a fraction of the size of todays) had made the equivalent
today of five million dollars! Such public success makes the so-called
popularity of artists today like Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and
Tracey Emin look laughable.
Like John
Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Giovanni Boldini, Antonio Mancini and the Irishmen
Sir John Lavery and William Orpen, Sorolla was one of the prodigiously gifted
academic painters of the late nineteenth century who tried to bridge the gap
between the drawing and painting skills of the Old Masters with the innovations
of Impressionism. Sorolla declared that violet was “the only discovery of
importance in the art world since Velázquez” and
like most of these Belle Epoch painters, his greatest concession to modernity
was his use of manufactured tubes of oil paint with all their newly developed
blues, reds, yellows, oranges, purples, violets, pinks and greens. For decades these Europe Has Got Painting Talent stars won competition after competition,
prize after prize, and medal after medal, and delighted their audiences with
flashy skills and kitsch melodrama - only for the whole competitive system and
their credibility to be ruined by a bunch of anarchistic punks on the fringes
of academia and society. In the age of Modernism that prized originality,
authenticity, sexual transgression and political dissent these Belle Epoch
virtuoso conformists were later condemned as conservative charlatans. So, they
are rarely mentioned in any text on Modernism except as bogymen.
Yet, they
remain immensely popular with amateur painters and the general public, whose
interest in art is limited to a delight in exceptional skill, as a source of
pleasure and form of escapism. Sorolla may not have been original or
intellectually challenging but he brought immense skill to his popular form of
naturalistic painting. Besides since Post-Modernism in the 1980s, the
establishment of museums like the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and ground-breaking
exhibitions like 1900:
Art at the Crossroads in 2000, historians and the general public have been
keen to see the context for the birth of Modernism and make up their own minds
about the winners and losers - even if that puts the fear of god into the
artistic liberal élite with their dogmatic notions about Modernism, artistic
value or political and moral virtue. Moreover, both artists and public today
mix high and low forms of art and entertainment as we see fit and get pleasure
in establishing unexpected connections between them. Personally, I wept with
self-loathing at Sorolla’s masterful painterly skills - but I was also very
inspired to try harder. Even if I only wanted to improve my skills to paint better
transgressive pornographic and insane paintings that would have appalled
Sorolla and his peers!
The painting I
most wanted to see was Sorolla’s huge dark canvas Sad Inheritance!, from 1899,
which had been inspired by Soralla seeing young disabled boys at the sea
under the care of a black-clad St. John of God brother. The painting was meant
as a warning against the supposed immorality, vice, alcoholism, and venereal
diseases of the children’s parents which many at the time believed had led to
the deformity of such children. Originally Sorolla had called it the even more
moralising title Children
of Pleasure. It won a
Grand Prix prize at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition and I had first seen it
in the catalogue to 1900:
Art at the Crossroads and I was
struck by its sad beauty and uncharacterizable style. It was the most
heartrending of Sorolla’s moralistic paintings and jittered uncertainly between
the academic, Impressionistic, Symbolist and almost proto-Expressionistic. I
was very moved by the way Sorolla captured the poor young boys naked and
deformed bodies - which was exaggerated by the fact that the figures further
back were treated in a sketch like and broken manner. It may not have been a
masterpiece, but it was unforgettably weird. A less successful earlier moralist
painting like White
Slave Trade from 1895,
depicting three young prostitutes with an older procuress being moved in a
train carriage to another brothel far away, was a beautifully constructed and
painted work but only the title gave any insight into this ambiguous
voyeuristic snapshot. Indeed, too many of Sorolla’s attempts at social
commentary were undermined by the stilted stage like quality of his compositions
and his subconscious, vicarious, voyeuristic indifference. Like so many
celebrity multimillionaire left-wing liberals today, Sorolla and his peers
loved to proclaim their moral concern and superiority – but really all they
cared about was the advancement of their careers and social status. Then as
now, art is the greatest fuck you buddy game!
By dividing
Sorolla’s work by genre rather than hang it chronologically - the curators
cleverly hid the confusion at the heart of Sorolla’s work. But it was only
after his rather dutiful portraits, social realism and morality tales did the
exhibition really catch fire with his famous and celebrated paintings of
children at play on the beaches of Valencia in Spain which had first been
inspired by his canvas Sad
Inhertance!. It was in his
delightful beach scenes that Sorolla really found himself. But the exhibition
then ended with the huge and unsatisfactory paintings of native Spanish people
in their traditional costumes - which were also serving as studies for his
enormous canvas/mural for the Hispanic Society of America in New York. Their unnecessarily large scale, broad and
uninspired filling in with colour, and frozen stagey life-painting quality -
weirdly reminded me of the late and equally unconvincing paintings of Edvard
Munch. They also reminded me of so many brash large canvases made by gloried
Post-Modern, Neo-Salon painters since the 1980s who raced to fill museum walls
around the world - and who had also given up on trying to express their soul or
anything authentic at all.
Still overall,
the Sorolla exhibition was the most joyous exhibition of paintings I had seen
in a very long time and I not only felt the urge to paint but also to buy every
tube of colour I could find at my local art materials supplier! I was dazzled
by Sorolla’s acute observation of light, masterful drawing, virtuoso skills
with the paint brush and kaleidoscopic colours - which nevertheless from a
distance remained highly naturalistic. Sorolla’s paintings were badly served by
reproduction which greatly neutered their complex colours, reduced their scale
and flattened their surfaces. So, he was one of those rare painterly painters
whose work had to be seen in the flesh to appreciate their skill and intensity.
Pessimistic, nihilistic and cynical, I was normally sceptical of such beautiful
and optimistic work, but Sorolla’s trauma free vision of the world -
particularly in his beach scenes - was very sincere, believable and infectious.
Perhaps, if art had not been hijacked by militant ideologs in the twentieth
century and was accurately judged by data on viewing figures like the Pop
charts rather than the judgements of a small Socialist and Anarchist
intellectual élite - Sorolla would still be considered one of the world’s greatest
painters. But the whole system of aristocratic patronage and recognition that
Sorolla and other Belle Epoch painters had relied upon was wiped out by the
cataclysm of the First World War which totally discredited the aristocracy in
Europe, shattered the complacency of the bourgeoisie, led to the emergence of
Communism, female suffrage, the undermining of the class system and the radical
Socialist, Anarchist and Communist politization of art.
Overall,
Sorolla’s oeuvre today, looks like the work of a very talented and hardworking
man afflicted by a split-personality - who wanted to be both an Old Master and
Impressionist simultaneously. As a poor working-class orphan with the skills of
a prodigy, Sorolla never had the luxury of playing artistic games - like so
many other artists with private wealth could do - he had to make a living! So,
he only seemed to paint what he thought could win medals, gain sales, attract
élite patrons and achieve mass approval. But he fatally wanted to be all things
to all people. At first he wanted to carry on the tradition of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya but his versions of
their work were lifeless, facile, crass and unbelievable; he wanted to be a
social realist reporting on social ills - but he lacked the outrage and intense
feeling for tragedy needed to make it convincing; he wanted to be a follower of
Impressionism but he lacked their originality - though he did create his
greatest paintings during this period when he married his traditional skills
with the visual excitement of painting outdoors and insights of Impressionism;
and finally he wanted to take all he had learned to create large and complex
multi-figure paintings that celebrated Hispanic life with the bright pallet of
the Impressionists – but the results were dull, dutiful and unbelievable.
Moreover, the spectres of decadence and kitsch hung over much of his work. His
admirable technical virtuosity was merely a tactical victory because he lacked
any real intellectual strategy. Or to put it another way, Sorolla could only
paint with such bravura confidence because he never once questioned his
academic training or the meaning of art or life. Unlike Cézanne who might have
had only a tenth of Sorolla’s manual skill - but was consumed by the most
extraordinary anxiety and doubt about the nature of reality that he had to
deconstruct and then reconstruct reality in such a way that he foretold both
Cubism and Abstraction. Likewise, while Sorolla painted psychologically healthy
and innocent paintings that revelled in the joys of life – Edvard Munch was
creating unsettling paintings that tapped into the alienation, angst and battle
of the sexes in modern society. Finally, in Picasso’s late teens, during
his omnivorous consumption of art, Picasso briefly went through a phase of
emulating Sorolla - but he quickly progressed far beyond him. And as Sorolla
was painting charming scenes of children at the beach – Picasso was
deconstruction the whole Western representational system with Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Still, the strategic failures and tactical
triumphs of Sorolla’s painting perfectly illustrated the middle-class and
conservative attempts to maintain the old world by adding just some of the
stylish looks of the modern to the ancestral tradition of western academic painting.
Moreover, during the seismic changes in European art and society on the fraught
hinge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Modernism was still
contentious and its future in doubt – painters like Sorolla made hay while the
sun shined.
Despite
Sorolla’s lack of intellectual ambition or prophesy, there were very few
painters in the twentieth century and virtually none in the twenty-first
century who possessed Sorolla’s combination of prodigious ability, impeccable
training and bravura panache. Looking at the progression of Sorolla’s early
dark brown and grey coloured paintings into his mature multicoloured work is
like seeing the transition from clunky black and white films to glorious
technicolour. But reinforcing the notion that he had a split-personality,
Sorolla went back and forth from dark academic realism to bright en plein air
painting for many years. Upon a firm foundation of academic drawing, tonal
painting and the subtle modulation of brushwork that varied from soft to hard,
blurred to sharp, broken to lyrical – Sorolla built a fireworks-display of
idiosyncratic colour. Learning from Diego Velázquez, Sorolla used two-foot long
paint brushes and stood off from his canvases to create an impressive overall
effect. Just look at the white sail being mended by women in Sorolla’s huge
canvas Sewing
the Sail from 1896. The painting of white is one of the most difficult
challenges there is for any painter and Sorolla made his task even more
difficult by depicting a huge sail in an open setting, surrounded by figures
and architecture and bathed in ambient light – yet he produced a seemingly
effortless tour de force of naturalistic painting that would put to shame most painters of the last hundred and twenty
years. The best we could come up would be Julian Schnabel taking actual sails
putting them on stretchers, throwing paint at them and calling them Jane Birkin! Although Sorolla fell short of Sargent’s fine
gift for glamourizing the subjects of his portraits, Sorolla was one of the
most naturalistic and sympathetic painters of children in art history - and
they were devoid of the perverted undertones so notable in other painters at
the time or since. Seen up close, Sorolla’s paintings were full of daring
juxtapositions of brushwork and unexpected colour – yet from a distance they
usually coalesced into utterly convincing naturalistic depictions. Moreover,
they emphatically celebrated painting from life en plein air which allowed him
to catch tricks of the light that working in the studio or from photographs
would never have caught. However, sometimes there were clumsy and unconvincing
abbreviations of drawing and colour in the details that gave away Sorolla’s
impetuous nature - and fear of the kind of finish that might kill the freshness
of his canvases. Yet, these flaws too were a celebration of the human soul in
its imperfect state. It was this
high-wire, dare-devil, liveliness that made the best of Sorolla’s paintings so
intoxicating.
After the
exhibition my brother very kindly bought me Sorolla: Spanish Master of
Light the beautiful,
large and well written catalogue to the exhibition! Then we all had coffee and
a bite to eat in the café before going home.