The Kunsthalle München presents the first comprehensive exhibition of Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga in Germany. Zuloaga shaped the image of Spain abroad like almost no other artist around 1900: toreros and spirited flamenco dancers; beggars, little people, and witches invoking the artistic legacy of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya; ascetics and penitents in vast landscapes withering under the blazing sun; the simple life of the rural population. In the wake of industrialization and Spain’s increasing orientation towards European Modernism, Zuloaga strove to preserve the “Spanish soul” with such scenes, which gained him international success. The exhibition brings together nearly 80 paintings by the artist, including numerous key works from public and private collections in Spain, France, Mexico, Argentina, the USA, Germany and Sweden.
Already during his lifetime, Zuloaga struck a chord with the public in Germany: In his works, a “real” and authentic image of Spain, as it was perceived...then, merged with the exotic-mythical place of longing as imagined by the German Romantics in the early 19th century. “Therein lies Zuloaga’s strength: to be a creator of myths”, the famous Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) noted. Zuloaga had many exhibitions in Germany between 1900 and 1914. His works were acquired by museums as well as private collections; writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Paul Klee (1879–1940), and August Macke (1887–1914) found inspiration in his paintings. In 1912/13, a show featuring twenty-five of his works was presented in Munich. In Spain, however, Zuloaga’s personal view of his homeland, criticized as unpatriotic by many of his fellow citizens, ignited fierce debates – and Zuloaga was denied official recognition for a long time. With the country facing a deep crisis after having lost the war with the United States in 1898 and hence its last important overseas colonies, his paintings became a political issue. Zuloaga dealt with nothing less than the great question of Spanish identity in his work: tradition or modernity, focus on the own country or a more outward-looking approach to Europe?
In nine thematic chapters the exhibition explores Zuloaga’s artistic career and locates him within the historico-cultural context of his time, including his close ties with the writers of the so-called Generation of ’98, the question of Spain’s self-image and its image among foreigners within Europe, as well as Zuloaga’s connections to the Paris avant-garde. Furthermore, his reception specifically in Germany is addressed, which in return is linked to Zuloaga’s complex relationship with the Francoist administration and his instrumentalization by the fascist regime. The show departs from the established yet too narrowly considered classification of Zuloaga as a painter of melancholic, gloomy, “black” Spain – in contrast to, for example, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) as a representative of the cheerful, folkloristic, “white” side. Zuloaga’s oeuvre is thus re-examined in all its complexity. With this project, the Kunsthalle continues its Spanish-themed exhibitions like Spain's Golden Age and Joaquín Sorolla, realized in 2016/17.
The first chapter is devoted to Zuloaga’s artistic beginnings and early years in Paris: In 1889 or 1890, the young painter, hailing from a distinguished Basque family of artisans, moved to the French capital – then the international center of the art world. Inspired by the formal experiments of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), the monochrome arrangements by James McNeill Whistler (1834– 1903), and the delicate milieu studies by his compatriot Ramon Casas (1866–1932), he created café and street scenes as well as his first portraits indebted to Naturalism. Paris became an important constant in Zuloaga’s life – a place he would return to again and again. Well-connected not only in the bohemian world, but also in the cosmopolitan high society, and friends with art stars such as Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), he also consciously sought the company of the lower social classes during his time spent in Spain. Zuloaga became a border crosser. His many travels and his long stays in modern Paris opened up a new perspective on his homeland.
Like many of his contemporaries, Zuloaga regarded the country’s archaic, original identity under threat by progress and increasing Europeanization. He wanted to preserve this identity in his paintings, expressing it in a mythically elevated manner. Zuloaga’s reception of the Golden Age masters, particularly El Greco (1541–1614) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), as well as Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), which is the subject of the exhibition’s second chapter, played a decisive role in his quest for the essence of Spanishness. With a modern, yet similarly respectful and melancholic view, he made outsider figures at the time, such as little people and beggars, the protagonists of his paintings.
The milieu of prostitution, which the artist located both in his French and his Spanish environments, and which is thematically featured in the exhibition’s third chapter, was a frequent subject in art around 1900. In Zuloaga’s work, Parisian street scenes can be found next to interiors with Spanish demimonde ladies. His depictions of the spectrum of female attraction, ranging from his flirtatious cousins to the nude figure in Celestina (Matchmaker), are characterized by a deliberate ambivalence where demure allure and disreputable seduction blend into each other.
Chapters four and five, which are biographically linked to Zuloaga’s Seville period (ca. 1894–1898), deal with folkloristically influenced works around the themes of bullfighting and flamenco dancing. Both motifs are closely linked to the culture of the Gitanos, the Spanish Roma, among whom Zuloaga maintained friendly contacts for decades. The world of the toreros – the painter learned the art of bullfighting himself – offered the greatest possible contrast to Parisian refinement. While bullfighting represented a central element of “barbaric” black Spain from the outside perspective, Zuloaga virtually ignored the actual bloodshed, focusing on portraying individual toreros as well as the customs and practices surrounding the ritual of bullfighting instead.
In his numerous paintings of dancers and Gitanas, Zuloaga established a female type, the exotic Andalusian woman, conceivably informed by the famous Carmen character, while his affinity with the Roma community is reflected in very individual representations that disengage with stereotypes. In 1898, Zuloaga’s relocation to Segovia marked the beginning of his most important work phase.
The sixth chapter of the exhibition focuses on his renderings of the barren, rugged landscape and its “archetypal” inhabitants, images often received as symbols of black Spain, which were created in Segovia and the surrounding area. His scenes decisively contributed to the dissemination of the “Castilian myth”: Embodying the historical origins of Spain, Castile was elevated to the status of national landscape; signifying originality and authenticity, its inhabitants represented the “spirit of the people.” An important group of works from the Segovian period is also formed by the numerous paintings of Zuloaga's cousins living there, who were considered, especially abroad, as the epitome of an authentic Spanish sensuality and an innocent, informal femininity.
Zuloaga’s religious scenes, which often capture Spanish popular piety, are at the center of the seventh chapter. Grounded in the traditions of mystical Catholicism that lives on to this day in the annual Easter processions, these renderings were perceived abroad as a fascinating element of Spain’s cultural heritage abroad. The fact that Zuloaga also struck critical and ironic notes is illustrated, for example, by the painting The Cardinal, which alludes to the Inquisition and for whose high dignitary subject the artist had an old worker pose as a model.
The exhibition’s final two rooms are dedicated to Zuloaga’s portraits on the one hand, which include representative commissioned paintings as well as intimate, private depictions of friends and colleagues, and with the relationship of portraits and landscapes on the other. Autonomous nature scenes with vast, barren stretches of land can be seen alongside the artist’s “landscape portraits.” For the latter, he developed a unique pictorial vernacular, often synthetically combining figures with mythically charged cityscapes like Toledo or Ávila vaulted by dramatic skies. Rather than striving for a naturalistic rendering, he consciously refers – for example by way of various light effects – to the disconnection between the two levels of representation. As an avowed Anti-Impressionist, Zuloaga did not seek the momentary. Rather, he regarded the landscape an “extension” of the figure, expressing the sitter’s essence, a projection of their soul.
This interplay of the private and the public, of figure and landscape, closes, at the end of the show, the circle of an oeuvre that reflects an ambivalent artistic personality in a world in upheaval: Zuloaga was a bourgeois bohemian, a modern cosmopolitan, and a romantic-nostalgic Castilian by choice; a representative of both bright, cheerful Spain and gloomy, tragic Spain; he was apolitical yet politically involved to the maximum; both opposed and revered. Comprising all these facets, his works continue to epitomize the myth of Spain to this day.
The Myth of Spain. Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) is an exhibition by Kunsthalle München, in collaboration with Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg. The exhibition will be on view there from February 17 to May 26, 2024.
With around 350,000 visitors every year, the Kunsthalle München is one of Germany’s most prestigious exhibition houses. Located at the heart of Munich, the Kunsthalle stages three large exhibitions a year on a variety of themes. Equipped with state-of-the-art museum technology, the approximately 1,200 m² exhibition space is a respected platform for artworks representing a variety of genres from painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography and crafts, through to design and fashion. The Kunsthalle München’s diverse program alternates monographic exhibitions with thematic projects, yet also includes interdisciplinary concepts.
Entrada actualizada el el 15 sep de 2023
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