2024.04.01 - BYU Art Museum

 

Silver Chalice with Roses - Julian Alden Weir, 1882

A week and a half ago when I was visiting home (Utah) I dropped by the BYU Art Museum.  I can't recommend their permanent art collection, but the temporary exhibit on Spanish and Latin art was worth seeing.  It went chronologically, and admittedly it started weak.  A few scattered artifacts of Bell Beaker Culture (pottery is unusually durable and so many early cultures are named after their pottery styles since that's how we even know they existed), but nothing that you'd appreciate without specialist knowledge.

Reaching the middle periods they had some El Greco and Velazquez but they weren't the most impressive samples either.  However, I was inspired to take a picture of this odd work:

The Wedding at Cana - Nicolás de Correa, 1696

 
It's a Mexican piece from the late 1600s about the wedding at Cana, but what was remarkable about it is that it was painted on wood with inlaid mother-of-pearl.  It was mildly three-dimensional with a texture unlike anything I've ever seen, a painting-mosaic-collage.  You can see what an unusual effect it has on the style, and while it ultimately felt a bit "off" as a painting I would love to see more examples of this "enonchados" style.

Setting aside a few decent portraits and such the next thing that caught my eye wasn't until Goya:

Pedro Mocarte - Goya, 1805

 Now, I'm generally not much of a Goya fan.  He strikes me as genuinely misanthropic and deranged.  His famous painting of Saturn devouring his children originally had a giant, erect phallus and he had it hung in his dining room to look at while he was eating.  Yeah, I think something went wrong in this guy.

However, here I think his "pessimistic" style worked.  This was a portrait of a friend who had been going through hard times, a professional musician and chorister who (like Goya himself) was losing his hearing.  The Spanish have always had a very peasant-earthy feel to their art, never getting far away from the body and its flaws, and it comes through in full here as this sad man is betrayed by his own.  Which really links to the next painting by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta:

The Penitents - Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, 1908

 This is a painting of a Spanish religious, err, festival, where that Christ is a wooden statue.  The penitents, the two guys without shirts, in order to show mortification of the flesh whip themselves until bloody.  There is something so ritualistically ghoulish about it, from the mask the front man wears to the way the old woman in the back left has her hands crossed in unmoved appreciation and approval of the goings on.  Combined with the very Spanish sense of the everyman (none of these people's faces are idealized, and very much lined by age and imperfection) it's one of those paintings that I can't say I like but which nonetheless conveys such a sense of the zealous Catholic devotion that runs through the culture.

On the wall just facing this was a family portrait by the same guy:

The Family of the Bullfighter, 1903

 I must remark on what a good choice this was by the museum.  While it's natural because both of these are by the same person, they also serve to show very contrasting elements within the culture.  You'd see the first above and think they're all serious psychos, moving around in dull cultish robes.  But here you get that other element that springs from what you could call "peasant simplicity", not simple faith but a simple vitality.  Nothing idealized about any of these people either, and indeed it just has a slight ramshackle look that, say, an Italian painting of a family wouldn't have.  Even if they'd accept realistic they would never accept undignified, but that's what we've got here with one dude smiling at the "camera" while the other is making a somewhat silly face at the girl on the right.

Which her dress was really a marvel to behold in person.  There's this interesting thing that's remarked on in the history of European art that color has a hit-or-miss relationship with our sense of intellect.  In general, we tend to be slightly suspicious of it, as something that affects the emotions directly rather than traveling through understanding first (relevant to our recent short-film discussions @nyy).  In this way very intellectual works tend to be colorless, like marbles, or the color is often subservient to form in a way that should never distract from it; even great colorists like the Venetians were careful with it.  But this simple riot of color here is just what people enjoy seeing, it's what you actually experienced when you walked around Athens in its day (all the statues were painted) as well as what many of the cathedrals looked like in their day.

 So in this way there's just something lively about it that again is related to the more peasant way of life, and to me that girl on the right encapsulated it with her dress - a dress that is frilled without being fancy, relatively simple without being spare.  It's just really pretty and she wears it well (there was a painting I didn't take a picture of with a British woman wearing that a similar dress and... she did not wear it well; being too prim in such a thing makes one look like you're just dressing up).  I really took the picture just for her, the rest was a bonus.

But again to give yet another contrast, this was a heavy painting from the north the Basque area by a guy named Solana:

Mariners of Castro Urdiales - José Gutiérrez Solana, 1915-1917

 If above we have the riotous Mediterranean life, here we have the colder Atlantic struggle.  This was possibly my favorite painting there, because in its colors and its structure it just spoke of salt-sprayed wood.  These people aren't miserable but they are a bit harder, a bit more used to storms that has weathered this entire group that could have been carved from driftwood rather than painted.  It almost smells like the fish.  Perhaps my enthusiasm is not carried off well here with only a picture, but I spent more time in front of this than any other.

The last few I have here are a bit of a mix.  One was a late painting by a guy named Isidre Nonell y Monturiol who unfortunately passed away in his late 30s just as he was beginning to hit it big:

La Roser - Isidre Nonell y Monturiol, 1909

 What is really delightful about this painting is just how large he has made the brush strokes across the cloak and hair to give them texture, yet how unobtrusive the technique is to immediately grasping the image.  The hair in particular looks like it has mass to it; look at it, it seems like it's a solid unit in the painting, a helmet set off so strongly against the simply-rendered but clear features of the woman.  And there, tracing the boundary where the two meet, you can't help but savor how smooth her skin is.  Which the expression itself is like the final touch to this, an indeterminate feeling, not happy, not sad, but perhaps with a sense of thoughtfulness.  She's not a dummy or a doll sitting for this painting and we would have to spend longer with her to know why she feels the way she does.

Somewhat strangely next to this was a work about some Moors driving slaves up a hill:

 

Arabs Ascending a Hill - Mariano Fortuny Marsal, c1864/66-1872

Looking at it in my picture it really fails to give the sense that it does in person.  This painting is in whirling, Impressionistic motion.  Despite the grim topic the sky has all the feeling of one of those beautiful, tumultuous spring days where it's perhaps just a little too cool to be outside without a jacket.  Yet you want to be out anyway because the air is clear, with that fresh, moist content that reminds you that this blue patch is perhaps only between life-giving storms.  The central figure, a Moroccan driving the captives, has his whole garb caught up in the winds, the cloak flying up around him.  Which you can see how then it all goes together; despite the clouds being in the upper right, the thrust up the painting is to the upper left, where the cloak is pointing and where you can feel both the people and the wind moving . The result is that the painting has this cyclonic motion, where you know the wind blows from the upper right, but it ends in the upper left after it has to have passed through the middle, and somehow all doing this transparently without having to curve the paint itself to emphasize it.  Again, despite the topic, this was such a thoroughly enlivening painting to experience.

Which on this Impressionistic, happy note, I'd like to end with a few from a guy named Sorolla:

 

Louis Comfort Tiffany - Jaoquin Sorolla y Bastida, 1911

What a great portrait this is of Mr. Tiffany (son of the fashion company fame).  It's just... so many European portraits are so painfully dull, with flat backgrounds focusing just only on the sitter's face or upper body.  Here you've got this extended sense that this man is in his element of beautiful things, enjoying the color and the canine companionship, without a whiff of pretension concerning his painting.  Sure it makes him look artistic, but that's almost, like, unnecessary to explain that this guy likes beautiful things considering what he's surrounded with.  This was also a rather large painting too (~2m across, I'd estimate), which just gave it an expansive element.  We might not be peering into the subtleties of this man's psyche like a Rembrandt would give, but we do get just a charming glimpse of his character.

The other Sorolla that caught my eye was a beach scene:

After the Bath, 1908

 He's apparently famous for beach paintings (I'd never heard of him before this, just speaking from minimal research since).  Lots of naked kids, which again is so very Spanish; little bodies running around.  But here this is such a great composition whose accompanying plaque added a lot to the appreciation: what looks natural is not.  That is, Sorolla has completely convinced us that this is just a casual event that he glimpsed, but we can actually trace the girl's pose back to a Greek statue (her dress is practically a toga), and the gesture of the boy putting the cloth around her has a similar structure to the one being thrown around Venus in Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus.

Why these are so fascinating is not just to show off knowledge of influences or "intertexuality", but in how he's drawn on them to also create his perspective on the girl.  I have a long discussion on female nudes, or female semi-nudes, in art, but the short version here is that Sorolla is looking to really evoke a bit of feminine beauty without sliding too far into sex.  That is so hard to do, and you can see the scattered failures throughout the history of art that either aren't evocative at all or are just a bit squick-y when it comes to admiring the female form (I'm looking at you Cranach the Elder).  But the Greek original was highly intellectual, a product of balanced form, and Botticelli's Venus was the most extraordinary attempt to marry the chaste Christian Mary with the amorous strumpet of antiquity.  So standing on these pillars, and using the everyman-effect that Impressionism brings to its subject, he's removed this ideal female from mythology and placed her right on the beach, sunbrowned in the Spanish sun but still beautiful.