Showing posts with label Sorolla Spanish Master of Light. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sorolla Spanish Master of Light. Show all posts

23/09/2019

Sorolla: Star of Europe's Got Painting Talent



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.