ART REVIEW: Meadows show focuses on expatriates who paved the way for Picasso

10:32 AM CST on Thursday, December 15, 2005

By JANET KUTNER / The Dallas Morning News

Artists shunted to the background by history often get rediscovered by future generations with fresh perspective. "Prelude to Spanish Modernism: Fortuny to Picasso," a groundbreaking show that opened Sunday at the Meadows Museum, does just that.

It tells a little-known tale of 23 Spanish expatriates who abandoned the academic style of their native country after moving to Paris in the 1860s, paving the way for Picasso's arrival almost 40 years later.

Most names are long forgotten – the majority of works have languished in storage since the early 1900s, many at prestigious institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan in New York.

"Many of these artists achieved enormous recognition during their lifetimes – not in Spain, but in major cosmopolitan centers like Paris, New York, London and Rome," says Meadows acting director Mark Roglán, who curated the show shared with the Albuquerque (N.M.) Museum.

Important Americans such as Henry Clay Frick and William Vanderbilt collected their works. A charming Raimundo Madrazo portrait of Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, painted during her first trip to Paris at age 5, was commissioned by her father. Joaquín Sorolla's admirers included John Paul Getty, founder of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Picasso, the most famous artist Spain has ever produced, is almost incidental to this story. By the time he got to Paris in 1900, his Spanish compatriots had paved the way for his acceptance. Five Picassos done between 1900 to 1906 serve as the coda, including a startling blue-period painting of a procuress with a diseased eye and the Kimbell Art Museum's rose-period painting of Nude Combing Her Hair, which leads directly to the great Les Desmoiselles d' Avignon of 1907, the work that marked the beginning of cubism and the modernist movement.

This story starts with Mariano Fortuny, whose success in Paris in the 1860s signals the rebirth of Spanish art, which had foundered following Goya's death in 1828. Fortuny enjoyed the greatest success of any Spaniard until Sorolla won the Grand Prix at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. By then Fortuny, who died of malaria at age 36, had been absent from the scene for almost 30 years.

He accomplished much in the short span of 15 years – Orientalist paintings such as Arab Fantasia, done in the exotic style of French artists from Delacroix to Matisse, and an eccentric Beach Scene at Portici, which compresses a seascape into a tall vertical format that looks unconventional even now.

In 1874, the year a critic's description of a Monet gave birth to the term impressionism, Fortuny did The Painter's Children in a Japanese Salon, a masterwork in the poetic style of symbolism favored by the Nabis painters who came two decades later.

The first half of the show, titled "Fortuny and His Circle," is divided into genre scenes, Orientalism, landscapes and pictures of modern life, although the line between the first and last categories gets blurred.

Highlights include Martín Rico's evocative views of Venice, where he spent almost all of his summers, and Luis Jiménez Aranda's historic Lady at the Paris Exposition (1889), depicting a fashionable young woman on a balcony in front of the newly dedicated Eiffel Tower.

There's considerable humor in the modern life corridor. Peralta del Campo depicts circus clowns commanding dogs to jump through hoops; León y Escosura, one of the first Spaniards to cross the ocean, captures the frenzy of an 1876 auction held in New York City.

Sorolla, who dominates the latter portion of the show with 18 works, many life-size or larger, had such a strong American following that a 1909 show held at the Spanish Society in New York drew more than 160,000 visitors in less than four weeks.

"It was the major blockbuster in America until the 1940s, and Sorolla returned to Spain with more than 1 million francs in his pocket," Dr. Roglán says. "He was more famous than Picasso at the time."

Two Sisters, Valencia, a gorgeous, sun-drenched beach scene, is exemplary of his spontaneous, fluid brushstrokes and joie de vivre . Other aspects of his work are represented: a haunting social commentary depicting a handcuffed woman being transported to prison in a third-class wagon; a lush orange grove next to a porch lit by a glaring summer sun; full-length portraits of elegant women à la John Singer Sargent; a turbulent landscape of snow-capped mountains with land and sky set aboil by thick brushstrokes reminiscent of Courbet.

Works by Ignacio Zuloaga, another great painter of the period, take a more somber, symbolic turn, with a dwarf cradling a huge crystal ball under one of her arms; a bearded hermit with a skull suggesting life's transience; and an elegant portrait of a beautiful Hungarian countess reclining on a divan upholstered in green satin, with dark curtains flanking a fantastic cloud scene in the background.

The show winds down with the Catalan School that imported modernism to Spain after the onset of World War I, in 1914, when many of the expatriates returned to their homeland. Some had carried Spanish symbols with them to Paris.

Back home, Spaniards imported styles derivative of everything from Art Nouveau flamboyance to Degas racetracks, leaving the balance of power in Paris, the center of the art world until the 1940s, when abstract expressionism made New York the capital.

This show could be a hard sell, given the prevalence of unfamiliar names. But it uncovers some wonderful pictures, and Dr. Roglán deserves credit for an original concept, well executed.

E-mail jkutner@dallasnews.com

"Prelude to Spanish Modernism: Fortuny to Picasso" is on view through Feb. 26 at the Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Southern Methodist University campus. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission $8, free for children younger than 12 and each Thursday after 5 p.m. 214-768-2516, www.meadowsmuseum dallas.org.