Malaga,
In contrast to other nearby countries, with the paradigmatic case of Italy, except for successful and specific examples that take into account The Venus of the mirror Velazqueña and Goya’s Maja its greatest exponents, the nude was not a central genre for Spanish artists until approximately a century and a half ago: it began to be cultivated frequently in the last stages of the 19th century and in the first third of the 20th . When it did become an established theme in the production of many, the next step was the overcoming through the body of academic teachings linked to a harmonious canon of physical perfection and a certain notion of decorum in favor of physical diversities that escaped idealization. usually applied to mythological or historical matters. From the perspective of many contemporary creators, the nude is not such if it is not presented in the absence of prejudice, assuming or subtracting weight from its provocative potential.
The Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga opens tomorrow to the public, under the curatorship of its curators Bárbara García Menéndez and Alberto Gil, the exhibition “Nudes. Normative and insurgent bodies in Spanish art (1870-1970)”, which examines the paradigm shift that its frequent appearance represented for the renewal and avant-garde movements, especially in the twenties and thirties of the last century, and the way in which The carnal would end up imposing itself on the ideal, turning anatomy into a territory suitable for experimentation; On the tour there will be no shortage of compositions dated during the Franco regime whose authors either recovered nineteenth-century postulates, more or less academic, or camouflaged the forms in an abstract language (in those who worked from exile the trends that emerged before the War would be maintained. Civil).
Thus, in this proposal by Thyssen from Malaga we will contemplate fragmented and other harmonious bodies, nudes that did not require excuses and others that are explained for narrative, symbolic or representative reasons; some derived from live models and others inspired by mannequins and no less disturbing for that, young and old, obvious or ambiguous, figurative and not; Around them we can often reflect on the views intended for them and they give rise, together, to a possible history (among many others) of the body in Spanish painting of the last one hundred and fifty years. The earliest corresponds to Sorolla, one of the last, to a late Miró, and along the way await us, among others, Anglada-Camarasa, Eduardo Arroyo, Juan Barjola, Francisco Bores, Ramón Casas, Eduardo Chillida, Ángel Ferrant, Mariano Fortuny, Menchu Gal, Julio González, Josep Guinovart, Gutiérrez Solana, Mateo Inurria, Celso Lagar, Baltasar Lobo, Maruja Mallo, José Moreno Villa, Aurelia Navarro, Picasso, Ignacio Pinazo, Josep Renau, Romero de Torres, Santiago Rusiñol, Antonio Saura , Joaquim Sunyer or Zuloaga, one of the first painters, the one from Éibar, to introduce blackness and morbidity into this genre, naturalism despite the stylization.
With their help, the curators propose a tour of Spanish art, without pretensions of exhaustiveness, from realism or modernism to informalism or conceptual currents, and with the nude as a common thread; The assembly emphasizes the possible relationships between the pieces and what each one of them contributes to the aforementioned aesthetic itinerary of the body as a motif linked, in the context of our country, to modernity. Beyond the fact that certain works could favor an evolution in the collective view towards nudity, this project emphasizes its role as a setting for the study of new forms and languages, of a particular aesthetic that accompanied social changes. That is the reason why a significant number of the chosen works offer us elderly, artificial, non-Apollinian bodies or those corresponding to ethnic minorities, and why the representation of a significant number of women among their authors has been sought.
In the same way that, for the most part, these compositions question conventions and dogmas, the purpose of the exhibition by the Thyssen from Malaga, which has nearly forty providers, is not to establish them either: it offers a story, but it lends itself to reflective contemplation or the sensory of the knowledgeable public and the amateur.
“Naked. Normative and insurrectionary bodies in Spanish art (1870-1970)”
CARMEN THYSSEN MUSEUM
C/Company, 10
Malaga
From October 8, 2024 to March 9, 2025