Valencia,
Half a hundred Valencian artists who worked between the mid -nineteenth and mid -twentieth century and who had a lot to do with the renewal of the academic parameters of representation of the landscapes and the scenes of customs are the protagonists of a new sample at the Bancaja Foundation.
“Scenes and landscapes in Valencian painting. XIX and twentie Benlliure Gil, Luis Beut, José Bru, Francisco Cabedos, Vicente Castell, Enrique Cuñat, Francisco Domingo Marqués, Luis Dubón, Rafael Estellés, Antonio Esteve, Bernardo Ferrándiz, Emilio Ferrer, Pedro Ferrer Calatayud, Emilio Ferrero Gómez, Antonio Fillol, Isidoro Garnelo, Balbino Giner, Constantino Gómez, Josep Guiteras, Josep Guiteras, Josep Guiteras, Josep José Manaut, Enrique Martínez-Cubells Ruiz, Salvador Martínez Cubells, José Mongrell, Bartolomé Mongrell, Antonio Muñoz Degrain, José Navarro, Enrique Navas, Julio Peris Brell, José Pinazo, Ignacio Pinazo, Cecilio Pla, Josep Renau, Amadeo Roca, Honorio Romero, Emilio Ros, José Ros, José Segrelles, Pedro Serrano Joaquín Sorolla, Ramón Stolz, Luis Felipe Usabal, Ernesto Valls, Emilio Varela and Julio Vila Prades.
Scenes of farmers and orchards, festive and clearly modern posters, hedonistic visions of the Valencian fertile field such as Arcadia (in which men and women become satyrs and nymphs in moments of loud), compositions of the sea and the albufera of Valencia, portraits of Valencians with characteristic characteristic and stamps of popular religiosity.
This exhibition intends to emphasize to what extent the rural life and the figure of the peasant (or farmer) acquired a preponderant role in the plastic developed in this region for a century, almost to the great industrialization of the sixties: they were often, those inhabitants and workers of the countryside, represented as depositories of a traditional identity that was glimpsed that would not last.
If some artists idealized their ways of life or interpreted them as genuine expressions of popular culture, others wanted to emphasize social readings – probably under the powerful influence of Blasco Ibáñez’s literature – and even a third group preferred to adopt more aesthetic and ornamental paths when it comes to bringing the sea or the garden to their canvases.
These works are not any rarity in the context of European painting that was contemporary: they proliferated, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, images of peasants and popular figures – individualized or shown as types, in the task or at rest – very backed by the collectors, as they had the opportunity to verify Fortuny and Martínez Cubells, whose iconographies exercised a good number of artists.
That they shared themes does not mean that they maintained on them, we said, common looks: if Pinazo deployed an aesthetic autonomy that made him a pioneer of the luminist landscape, José Benlliure paid a realistic attention to the anecdotes and sorolla consolidated naturalism and the possible social readings of the Valencian rural environment.
From an openly critical approach to the worst social tics, the work of Antonio Fillol must be read, which opened many mouths in the recent exhibition on Spanish social painting of the Prado, and the world of work and the least favored, and also occupied Andreu, Mongrell and the aforementioned Pina, among others.
The new ways of contemplating human realities also transformed those of the observance of the landscape, increasingly object of excursion and enjoyment and less means of life. Muñoz Degrain would be one of the first discoverers of the greatness of the Valencian mountain in the pictorial field; Those places also captivated Ramón Stolz.
On behalf of the avant -garde line overturned in the posterism and the graphic work, Cabedos, Aguar, Renau or Barreira will be paid; And another important chapter is that of religiosity, a pillar of everyday life in the period analyzed and present in both massive rituals and intimate gestures.
It is not lacking in the tour of this exhibition The return of the fishing Of sorolla, essential piece in the section centered on the sea and the albufera and in the expression of the hard outdoor work in a way until then never so alive or so direct. By compositions like this, Rafael Doménech defined the sea as The richest mine of chromatic sensations and the beach as a great school.
“Scenes and landscapes in Valencian painting. XIX and XX centuries”
Bancaja Foundation
Tetuán Square, 23
Valencia
From May 9 to September 14, 2025
