Madrid,
It has been a century since Valle-Inclán outlined it in his texts as a concept, otherwise timeless, giving rise, more than to a literary genre, to a thought that is not easy to define, complex, derived from the observation of politics and society during the Restoration and with aesthetic ramifications. The new exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum, “Esperpento. Popular art and aesthetic revolution”, puts images and some sounds to that elusive notion of the grotesque so that it is the viewer who, having completed his journey, reaches his own conclusions about what this term, defined by the Royal Academy as deformation of reality accentuating its grotesque features, implies in the Spanish history of the last hundred years.
A critical distance and his well-known inclination towards sarcasm made it possible for the Galician writer to propose this formula for artistic renewal, symbolized in the concave mirrors of the Callejón del Gato and effectively based on the disfigurement of very real references without fear of extravagance and caricature. . The most common studies on the grotesque have approached it from a literary approach or in relation to black Spain or a supposed singularity of our country, but the purpose of this MNCARS project, which has half a dozen curators (Pablo Allepuz, Rafael García, Germán Labrador, Beatriz Martínez-Hijazo, José A. Sánchez and Teresa Velázquez), is to analyze their presence or reflection in plastic arts and in different forms of popular culture that coexisted with the avant-garde: we will see on the first floor of the building Sabatini blind man’s romances (stories of more or less gruesome themes), alleluias (prints that made up series and explained certain matters in verse), caricatures, pages of satirical press, the first devices that transformed our way of looking before the cinema or testimonies of passing through our towns bullulús (itinerant actors with a varied repertoire of which there is evidence as early as the 17th century).
Referring to those deforming mirrors, the first rooms of this exhibition relate those ways of seeing, then new technologies that synthesized or increased their sources for the experiment of some and the entertainment of many, and ways of understanding and representing the body, in a initial moment under the weight of Goya, a pioneer in the depiction of grotesque physiques and scenes (another exhibition at the Reina Sofía, in 2013, already showed his influence on artists who worked during the Civil War). The Aragonese is not represented in this montage, Leonardo Alenza or Eugenio Lucas Velázquez are, who copied his work in the Prado and appraised the Black Paints; In any case, it was the creator of Max Estrella himself who credited him with the invention of esperpentismo, whose roots here we are also proposed to search for in the picaresque novel of the Golden Age.
There is no shortage of satirical headlines contemporary to Valle-Inclán in this opening, from whose influence he would not escape, such as The Fat, The Skinny either Gil Blaswhich dissociated politics from any aura or praise, turned people into animals or dolls and parliament into a circus, an arena or, very frequently, a theater.
A second section in the tour already delves into the beginning of the 20th century, a time that is identified here with a change in perspective: that provided by the pictorial and filmic manifestations that proposed visions from above (by then, the theory of relativity and the progress of quantum physics modified the concepts, if not also the perception, of matter, time and space; and World War I meant, for the first time, the introduction of aviation into a war) and the link to an alteration of the states of consciousness facilitated both by drugs and by spiritualist and theosophical currents that achieved a certain diffusion, at least among some social strata and among quite a few artists and literary authors – Hilma af Klint will soon arrive at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Valle was interested in esotericism and magic, as testified The wonderful lamp. Spiritual exercises (1916), where he spoke of aesthetic quietism as the origin of his poetry: he alluded to the contemplative experience derived from fixing the imprecision of sensations to find what our thoughts hide from us. The purification of the images he achieved is linked here with that contemporary vision of height and his occasional consumption of Indian hemp is recalled; also his work Kif’s pipein which he tried to overcome the given concepts of space and time and offer a perspective of what was narrated cubist-futurist-strident. A painting by André Masson and a triptych by Boccioni have arrived in this section of the exhibition, moodsmore symbolist than surrealist, in the case of the first, and than futurist, in the second. The Italian suggested here the accelerated dynamism and absence of stillness typical of modern life based on a railway station.

Later, the Valle-Inclán farces are connected with the European trend, in the 1920s, towards theater re-theatricalization (a concept named by Ramón Pérez de Ayala who, compared to nineteenth-century postulates, emphasized the importance of scenic elements, gesture and plastic arts with respect to text and declamation); Don Ramón María confessed to writing for dolls, on the path of Teatro dei Piccoli Italian, promoted by Vittorio Podrecca, and on similar dates Falla premiered his Altarpiece of Master Pedroinspired by a fragment of Don Quixoteanother antecedent of the grotesque according to Valle.
It has not been strange that the supposedly innocent puppet stages were used to reveal the interests of those in power or to diminish the heroism of some historical figures; clearly occurred in the influential Ubu king by Alfred Jarry, first piece of a almost tradition of puppets capable of combining parody and protest.

Furthermore, the Galician’s emblematic works are closer to popular phenomena and not so much to those that criticized the political and social context: we are referring to carnivals, bohemia or the introduction of alternative forms in the representation of religious motifs. Of Shrove Tuesday stories linked to violence against women or militarism are extracted to find aesthetic resonances (at this point we will find Gutiérrez Solana, perhaps our greatest painter of the macabre and the humorous in the first half of the last century, as well as with rural and urban carnivals of Laxeiro or Maruja Mallo); Bohemian lightswhere the grotesque is formulated as a result of the reflection of classical heroes in concave mirrors, is linked to the deforming procedures of isms and to the intersection, in the Madrid night, of bohemianism and anarchism (Antonio Fillol will appear in our path, who moved in the last Prado storm); and Altarpiece of lust, greed and deathamong other compositions, shakes hands at the Reina Sofía with puppets, silhouettes and religious images at the service of individual forms of piety, peculiar but perhaps a reflection of genuine spirituality: those that Tía Sandalia, who chose to wear a habit despite Not being a nun, she kept things in the silo where she lived in the Toledo town of Villacañas.

End the sample with Tyrant Flags and the reference to the authoritarianisms of the twenties and thirties: the tyrant of José Clemente Orozco may be here the greatest incarnation of the grotesque, and we will contemplate a scenic installation made specifically for the MNCARS by the collective Lagartijas tiradas al sol, dedicated to women who have resisted dictatorships. Also emphasizing that The Iberian arenaan unfinished project at Valle’s death in 1936 and a bullfighting allegory of national history that connects with the Episodes by Galdós, could be related to quite a few artistic creations from that same moment, such as Executions in the Badajoz bullring (1939), by Martí-Bas, and the same concave mirrors, with our present continuous.

“Amazing. Popular art and aesthetic revolution”
NATIONAL MUSEUM REINA SOFÍA ART CENTER. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From October 9, 2024 to March 10, 2025