Under the Spanish Volcano

In Spain, the centuries have tended to overlap rather than to glide past in smooth succession. The subject of Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, painted in 1618, would hardly have changed her dress or used different utensils had she lived two or three hundred years later. In the 1950s, at a construction site in Leon, the engineer and novelist Juan Benet recalled a horse trader teaching him the old trick of pouring oil into a recalcitrant donkey’s ear to drive it uphill with its burden. As late as the early twentieth century, modernization remained out of reach for most Spanish citizens. Catalonia, which began industrializing in the 1730s, proved an exception to the rest of the country, where de facto feudal arrangements persisted well past the Spanish Civil War. 

The proceeds of empire and the mineral wealth in the Basque Country and Asturias in the nineteenth century fostered an anemic bourgeoisie attuned to the philosophical and ideological currents on the European continent. But Spain’s chronic indebtedness forced it to rely on foreign investment for railroads, mines, and foundries, which left its developed areas as, in the words of one scholar, “colonial enclaves disconnected from their surroundings.” Small islands of Europeanized bourgeois sensibility arose in the cities, which were controlled by an often venal coterie of administrators, but industrial workers were confined generally to cramped, disease-ridden slums. The mass of the country remained a rural backwater. The tensions between aspiring laborers and the profoundly conservative ruling classes led to a series of confrontations between poor and rich, laborers and owners, republicans and royalists, which persisted until the Franco dictatorship. 

This moment of ferment and conflict around the turn of the century—which Manuel Azaña, Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic, described as a “deep unrest in the country’s morals” and compared to the subterranean rumblings of a volcano—was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Prado, “Art and Social Change in Spain: 1885-1910.” The show covered the period of the humiliation of the Spanish-American War, which ended with Cuban independence and the American annexation of Guam and the Philippines. These losses inspired a profound sense of grievance among the bloated officer class and confirmed, for the intellectuals known as the Generation of ’98, deep apprehensions about their country’s backwardness and corruption. This group, which included Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, shared a pessimism, a sense that Spain’s military fiascos and internal decay were signs of the country’s moral destitution, a sentiment epitomized by Ángel Ganivet in his Idearium español:

No sooner than the nation was constituted did our spirit flood past the course marked for it, spilling across the globe in search of vain peripheral glories, leaving the nation a mere barracks, a hospital for invalids, a breeding ground for beggars.

As they fretted over the direction the disgraced metropole would take, these writers struggled with a question increasingly vital to thinkers and statesmen across Europe: what it meant to be modern, what obligations it entailed. Artistically, this preoccupation would provoke a turn away from history painting and toward contemporary events: the chronicling of causes célèbres, the lives of workers and peasants. Even as Spain lagged economically behind its northern neighbors, its artists maintained strong contacts there, particularly in France, and would contribute, above all in the urban centers, to debates about the future of the country’s industrial, moral, and intellectual development. 

Laid out over an entire floor of the Edificio Jerónimos, an expansion of the Prado opened in 2007, “Art and Social Change in Spain” presented more than three hundred works—photographs, paintings, prints, and the occasional sculpture—distributed among four galleries and organized by themes including illness, emigration, strikes, and poverty. There were pieces there of merely propagantistic value, like Xavier Gosé’s Japanese-influenced illustration denouncing execution by garrote vil. Others are of largely historic interest, like Ventura Álvarez Sala’s large canvas Emigrants, which faithfully records the attire, the physiognomy, and even the sober, apprehensive attitudes of the masses of Spaniards who hoped to hacer las Américas, as the saying goes, making their fortunes in Latin America. Still others join the documentary and artistic impulses, in works alternately absorbing and unsettling that show the halting, uneven, violent progress of a society blinkered by Catholic provincialism, which, for its supposed benightedness, the painters Darío de Regoyos and Émile Verhaeren referred to as España Negra (“Black Spain”).

Picasso was present here in a handful of adolescent works of which the most striking was The Frugal Meal, an engraving both formally intriguing and dense with a pathos often absent in his better-known paintings—it shows a blind man in a bowler with long, spindly fingers pulling himself close to a stolid female companion who glances over at their two glasses of wine, their empty soup bowl, and their crust of bread. There are a few of Juan Gris’s early drawings for magazines, of demimondaines and their monocle- and tuxedo-wearing suitors, notable for their humor and frivolous elegance. Apart from these the only artist that nonspecialists are likely to recognize is the impressionist Joaquín Sorolla, whose monumental series of fourteen paintings entitled Visions of Spain hangs in a dedicated room in the Hispanic Society of New York. 

I confess I have never warmed to Sorolla; there is something trite to me in his obsession with sun on blue sea, sun on white sailcloth, sun on bare bodies, sun on green leaves; Unamuno decried his work as “paintiness and not painting.” His talent is such that I never feel the friction between intuition and expression that gives so much art its vitality, and his greatness is somehow too great: astonishingly successful, portraitist of kings and presidents, friend to the writers and luminaries of his time, he possesses a fulsome universality that wearies more than it enchants. 

The Prado exhibition, though, showed him in a good light. It is hard to deny the power of his Sad Inheritance! (1899), originally entitled The Sons of Pleasure in reference to the hereditary syphilis that supposedly afflicted its subjects. Measuring seven by nine and a half feet, it portrays the charges of a children’s asylum—“society’s dregs, blind, mad, sickly, leprous,” in the artist’s words—accompanied by a somber friar for their therapeutic bath in the sea. The contemporary viewer is struck by the tragedy of the figures themselves: the emaciated boy in the foreground struggling toward the water on his crutches, the eyeless faces, the child with one leg. But Sorolla, like most Spanish social painters and writers of his time, worked in the shadows of Émile Zola, who saw the artist as “experimental moralist,” and viewed the plight of individuals as representative of evolutionary social ills. (Curiously, Sorolla himself didn’t like it. He called it “the only sad picture I’ve painted,” claimed it had made him suffer terribly, and vowed never to produce anything like it again.)

Less pointed but more striking is Sorolla’s White Slavery (1895), the centerpiece of a section of the exhibit devoted to prostitution. The painting depicts four young women from the provinces, their brightly patterned garments contrasting with the mourning clothes of their old, careworn procuress. Its slight compositional asymmetry is to be explained by the absence of a fifth, possibly male figure to the left, visible in two preliminary sketches done in pen-and-ink and gouache. Apparently, Sorolla’s de facto agent in Paris, the artist and aristocrat Pedro Gil Moreno de Mora, folded the canvas to save on shipping costs; Sorolla subsequently trimmed the folded part away. Happily, the result is more claustrophobic, with the dark narrowness at the rear of the train car where the women innocently rest hinting at the insistence with which a life of servitude is closing in on them.

The cliché of the prostitute as hapless victim or as merry courtesan predominates in many of the pieces. An exception is the unusually titled Vividoras de amor (1906) by Julio Romero de Torres. It’s not easy to translate this phrase, or to decide what the artist’s intention was—at first glance, it looks like a typical euphemism, “women who make their living from love.” At the same time, vividora carries connotations of both scrounger and bon vivant. If the last of these is meant, then Romero’s choice of words is caustic. He portrays four women of his native Andalusia in a spare, whitewashed room. One is bent over, possibly to slip on her shoe; another poses with her legs crossed, leaning across a wicker chair, cheek propped on her elbow, expectant; behind her, wrapped in a mantilla, a third woman sleeps serenely, looking like a Romanesque Virgin; on the far left, the last girl peeks in through a doorway, as though hurrying to catch sight of a new arrival. 

Certain critics have interpreted the austerity of the surroundings—there is one picture on the wall, no railing on the stairs, and a brazier with cold ashes on what is likely a floor of pounded earth—as a quasi-abstraction meant to emphasize the women’s poverty. Romero’s biographer says it is likely the women’s dining room, but my suspicion is that it is a realistic portrayal of the parlor of a typical Andalusian brothel. Córdoba, where Romero was born, was a city in ruins when he submitted this painting to the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1906: its population was perhaps a fifth of what it had been before the Reconquest, it was plagued with hunger and disease, its roads were hardly transitable, and the surrounding provinces were full of starving peasants. 

Romero’s women are fully clothed, but the jury found them obscene. One anonymous journalist denounced the painting as “pseudo-artistic rot.” What is disturbing is its subjects’ irreducible peculiarity: they are neither fallen women nor seductresses, neither lascivious nor ashamed. What they exude, overwhelmingly, is life bent to circumstance. The way they stare back at the viewer—shy, curious, weary—reminds him (and in this case the spectator is undoubtedly a him) that the problem this work examines, whatever social arrangements sustain it, is fundamentally anchored in his own desire. 

A few photographs, mostly anonymous, bear witness to the lives of such women in the brothels of Barcelona, mostly in the absurd poses that appealed to collectors of the time. There was one, however, to which I kept returning, from around 1915: a tight interior shot of two women standing around a wardrobe with a cluttered marble top while a third, seen in profile, sits sideways in a chair, her arm resting across its back. It is a touching reminder of the work of waiting. One seems to hear the seated woman taking a breath, and feels the accumulated weariness of days of toil that regularly stretched on for twelve hours or more.

Basque and Catalan artists predominated, as they must in an exhibit on social change, because so much of the rest of Spain remained stagnant during the period in question. Many can be called genre painters; some have a curious, folkloric charm, like Ricardo Baroja, whose etchings remind one of Edward Gorey’s eerie children and ghouls in topcoats mingled with Goya’s caprices. The artist who stands out most for his creative vision rather than his politics is Isidre Nonell, best known for his paintings of gitana women, two of which were on display in this exhibition. Nonell’s refusal of exoticism in his portrayals won him little regard—a contemporary called him a “singular failure”—though he was the artist Picasso had most admired during his early years in Barcelona. Nonell’s stark lines surrounding geometric patches of color in In the Doorway of a Church (Waiting for Soup) (1899) seem almost certain to have influenced Picasso’s little-known Gypsy in Front of Musca (1900), though Picasso’s taste for strong primary colors is a far cry from Nonell’s more muted palette. 

Nonell is responsible for arguably the most haunting work of the exhibit, a small, dark drawing, about the size of a sheet of notebook paper, executed in a technique of his own invention that he called frying: using printer’s ink, powdered pigment, watercolor, and conte crayon to produce stippled, ghostly images in which line and shadow emerge precariously from the background. Repatriated Soldier From Cuba on the Dock (1898) shows an anonymous, bony figure, hands in his pockets, swaddled in a coat for which he has grown too small, staring across the blue-black waters at what might be the customs house, though it is difficult to tell: in its abstract, shadowy aloofness, the building puts one in mind of Kafka’s castle. 

In the section devoted to strikes and social appeals, the minor works are perhaps the most attractive. While it is hard not to be impressed by Vicente Cutanda’s gigantic Workers’ Strike in Vizcaya (1892), its hundred-plus square feet of gray smoke, red berets, raised arms, and blue espadrilles has a kind of pep rally feel that detracts from its aesthetic merits. Its highest praise unsurprisingly came from the federalist statesman Francesc Pi i Margall, who lauded its understanding of the strike as the primordial form of working-class struggle in tones perfectly suited to a communiqué from the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. A group of paintings submitted in application for a scholarship to the Spanish Academy in Rome by Eduardo Chicharro, Manuel Benedito, and Fernándo Álvarez de Sotomayor on the subject of “the family of an anarchist on the day of his execution” takes its subject as tragic archetype rather than individual participant in class conflict. Their emphasis on the sorrow of the occasion of his death, with no hint as to the anarchists’ grievances, looks forward to a rather odious narrative of the Spanish Civil War that gained favor under Franco, in which fratricidal rancor was made to stand in for the political injustices that had torn the country apart.

Particularly touching are the photos of strikers and protesters, such as the poor men building a barricade on a Barcelona street prior to a series of armed conflicts in 1909 known as the Tragic Week. Even in compositional terms, Eugenio Mesonero-Romanos y Barrón’s picture of an assassination attempt against the king and queen of Spain on their wedding day in 1906 has a dynamism that recalls the battle scenes of Delacroix. As one departed the exhibit, one saw a small, full-length portrait in black and white by Luis Ramón Marín of a man standing in a corner, feet awkwardly angled to his right, with a gentle, contemplative look on his face. It is the anarchist Manuel Pardiñas, who allegedly committed suicide after assassinating the Spanish president, José Canalejas, on November 12, 1912. Coming close, you can see his temple has been shaved to reveal an entry wound from his Browning. He is not in fact standing, but rather hanging from two small wires attached to his head.