Sorolla pleinairista, also in Andalusia

Malaga,

The Sorolla Museum in Madrid closed last October for expansion and remodeling works, in principle until 2026, but the opportunities to enjoy the Valencian production are growing in several Spanish cities, to the delight of the nostalgic and still commemorating the centenary of the death of the painter.

If the Valencian Bancaja Foundation proposes, precisely from funds coming, to a large extent, from the center of Madrid, a dialogue between its art and the texts of Manuel Vicent based on the attention of both to the Mediterranean and life with it, the Gallery of the Royal Collections presents the anthology “Sorolla, one hundred years of modernity”, which has almost eighty paintings representative of all his stages, one of them unpublished and until now considered missing: Paris Boulevard (1890), which had not been exhibited since the year of its creation. Likewise, the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. Until a few weeks ago, MUREC, in Almería, offered us “Sorolla and the renaissance of Valencian painting,” a tour of works by Valencian and Spanish artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that had national and international projection.

Now the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga celebrates the vitality of this author’s legacy, which, a few days late due to weather circumstances, will open to the public tomorrow, November 15, the exhibition “Sorolla in Andalusia”, curated by Enrique Varela Agüí and intended to review the presence of Andalusian landscapes, monuments and popular types in the work of the painter, who between 1902 and 1918 moved on numerous occasions to the provinces of Málaga, Granada, Seville, Huelva, Córdoba and Cádiz.

Curious and a traveler, this wandering through the places that offered him the light he was looking for was one of the impulses of Sorolla’s career: as an artist who worked from nature, we can say that completely pleinairisthe moved again and again to the locations he considered most suitable to plant his easel; The exteriors offered him possibilities for action that he could never find in the studio. He visited cities and towns, was interested in the heritage, the people and their customs and took his impressions to a good number of canvases of which this center now shows us a small but significant selection.

Unlike his well-known seafaring representations, the beach scenes that he carried out in his Valencian land and the images that he gave to the elegant walks on the shores of the Cantabrian Sea, in Santander or San Sebastián, the compositions that Sorolla created in the south are surely more varied in their themes and poetic in their background: he focused on the overwhelming views that can be seen from the Alhambra; in the silence transmitted by the peaceful and empty gardens of the Reales Alcázares in Seville; in the bustle of the cafes where flamenco was sung and the overwhelming beauty of the dancers. He sought to reflect the attractiveness of the coasts, of course, but also the popular fervor in processions, parties, leisure and work, and if there is no work among his Valencian works that does not transmit an unmistakable luminosity, those he devised in south are able to suggest elf.

Joaquin Sorolla. María la guapa, 1915. Sorolla Museum

The curator considers that these features, the liveliness present in his Andalusian pieces, did not remain only in them, but expanded their influence to much of his later work, enriching his taste. The Martínez Campos mansion where he lived in Madrid was built in the same years in which he made these trips, hence the configuration of the Sevillian and Granada gardens (those of the aforementioned Reales Alcázares, the Alhambra and the Generalife) left their mark on the design of his own, that certain aesthetic references survived and that among the archaeological, botanical, ethnographic and artistic objects that he collected in the capital, many came from precisely the south.

It is part of the collections of the Malaga Thyssen, by the way, the study of a Sevillian garrochista dated 1914, preparatory for the panel The confinementwhich was to complete the decoration of the library of the Hispanic Society of America, and was quickly executed in oil on cardboard. The exhibition has been installed precisely on the second floor of the center, due to its relationship with the many works from the Spanish fin de siècle that we can see here.