Almería,
Soon he will have a decade since the Prado Museum dedicated a wide retrospective to Mariano Fortuny: it was in 2017 and who was his commissioner, Javier Barón, then defined it as the most influential Spanish painter of the nineteenth century from the death of Goya to the birth of Picasso, and also the most cosmopolitan, despite his very short life, only 36 years. It became, cosmopolitan, thanks to his trips, his open gaze and a formation that made it possible to develop from his early youth a polyhedral personality, cultivate very diverse topics and express himself in all kinds of techniques (oil, watercolor, etc.fort or drawing). Also become a privileged eye collector, who first acquired objects that he needed to paint and later, after making fortune, first -order artistic pieces that are integrated today in the collections of the Louvre or the Hermitage. He was interested in historical and everyday moments and was a lover of Morocco, of the eastern culture and of what was pure and authentic: from childhood to albaicin, the sea and the sun to death or the human body.
Formed in Rome for three years, his stays in North Africa (in 1860, 1862 and 1871) allowed him to discover an Arabic imaginary whose influence, in the form of warm atmospheres and bohemians, maintained throughout his career, brief as we said, but very fruitful. He was fascinated by his simple ways of life, his austere houses … and he had ease to capture his culture, as he always kept it to capture life and light around the Mediterranean, often from original low points of view.
With delicacy similar to that which managed his painting he did the same in the engraving, fundamentally in the remembered etc. – he can correspond to that discipline his most enigmatic works – and in the watercolor, which around 1860 began to consolidate himself as an autonomous technique, in which he developed with very loose brushstrokes, sometimes in scenes taken from the natural and grenade and evident testimony of his taste for archeology and his aesthetic will, of his eagerness to improve reality. The unconception of its characteristic of its production would go more in the final years, also the vibrant touch of its strokes. He probably did not consider that the painting had primacy regarding the rest of the disciplines, compositional solutions that he found in this medium applied them in the rest and the role was one of the supports in which his concerns overturned with greater impulse.
Within the framework of the commemoration for the century and a half elapsed since the death of the Reus artist, which was fulfilled in 2024, the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism of Almería. Murec opens tomorrow, March 28, the exhibition “Fortuny and its surroundings in the Vida Muñoz collection”, which will have almost ninety works, between oils, watercolors, drawings and engravings, from those funds by Manuel Vida and Carmen Muñoz, especially rich in works of this author and in his Granada stage.
The sample approach, which Javier Pérez Rojas has commissioned -who in 2016 was responsible for the Centenary of Pinazo -is to place Fortuny’s aesthetics in the context of the art of his time, in that of the pictorial renovation in Spain in the nineteenth century, emphasizing how Catalan anticipated some of his subsequent paths, such as attention to the lumínic effects in the lumínic Tendency to leave certain unfinished works or the synthesis of some features of ancient teachers with an imaginary close to fantasy.
Although they are dated throughout their scarce years of experience, among the compositions gathered in Almeria predominate oils carried out in Andalusia, an important part of their sentimental and artistic geography, but we will also see pieces made in Rome and Portici. If in Granada and its surroundings he looked for paths for the renewal of his style, and there he remained two years, in the Italian capital he was highly demanded by artists, collectors or antiquarian, he finished some of the images he had started in Spain and would be appreciated by authors such as Attilio Simonetti, Filippo Pallizzi or Domenico Morelli. We can say that the culmination of his journey came in Naples, where he had the opportunity to capture the atmospheres of Campania before his death, which survived him in Rome.
We must mention the complexity of their landscapes: as a workshop painter who did not use nature, he did not cultivate landscape in its most frequent dimension, but he did incorporate the environment to his work; In many of his fabrics, although especially in his paper creations, the role that those atmospheric effects on the gestation of their aesthetics are appreciated.
The presentation of this exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that deepens the context of Fortuny’s journey, with texts by Amaya Alzaga Ruiz, Francesc Quílez Corella, those mentioned Javier Barón and Javier Pérez Rojas and Juan Manuel Martín Robles, in addition to guided tours, didactic workshops and conferences.
“Fortuny and its surroundings in the life Muñoz collection”
Museum of contemporary Spanish realism. Murec
San Luis Paseo, s/n
Almería
From March 28 to June 1, 2025
