Paris. On a section of wall, the portrait of the perfect Spanish aristocrat. On another, a sober composition with Flemish accents. Opposite, a chiaroscuro scene reminiscent of the great Italian masters. At the Jacquemart-André Museum, all it takes is one look to grasp the multiple influences that nourished the Spanish Golden Age, an art marked by spirituality as well as the intensity of expressions. The Parisian museum offers a beautiful overview of this artistic vitality by presenting around forty works from the rich collections of the Hispanic Society of America. “This is the first time that this selection has been shown to the French public, because our collection could not be loaned for a long time for legal reasons,” specifies Guillaume Kientz, director of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, who is curator with Pierre Curie, curator of the Jacquemart-André Museum. Above all, such a generous loan would not have been possible without the closure, for renovation, of the old painting rooms of the New York institution.
Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Portrait of a girlcirca 1638-1642, oil on canvas, 51 x 41 cm.
© The Hispanic Society of America, New York
On the museum’s walls, masterpieces by big names rub shoulders with works lesser known to the public. To the famous Pieta (around 1574-1578) du Greco responds to his study of Christ in glory (around 1576-1577), recently acquired at auction and visible for the first time in France. The highlight of the exhibition, the room dedicated to Diego Velázquez also presents one of his rediscovered early works, Kitchen scene (1617), that its mysterious Portrait of a young person girl (around 1638-1642, [voir ill.]), flagship piece of the collections of the Hispanic Society of America. By contrast, a few rare works that are less remarkable from a pictorial point of view stand out in the cramped rooms of the museum: two small paintings depicting young aristocrats, a processional painting by a Peruvian artist, certainly more rudimentary in style but with a spectacular radiant frame…
If the virtuosity of the gesture varies, this opening to the arts of the Americas, far too rarely exhibited, is of certain interest. “The painting that develops in Latin America should not be seen as painting subordinate to Spanish art. She has her own genre, her own school,” insists Guillaume Kientz. Works accompanying public worship or paintings testifying to a more intimate devotion: colonial societies were also active artistic centers, where innovations and techniques circulated. Among the most striking pieces gathered here, theenconchado by the Mexican Nicolás de Correa (around 1660-around 1720) depicting a biblical scene entirely encrusted with iridescent mother-of-pearl. An exhibition which brilliantly restores all the diversity of Hispanic art from the Golden Age.
