Painting: Strong painter, weak person

Can art first cause a stir and disappear from public consciousness like never before? The example of the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloagas gives food for thought – ultimately about the question of the relationship between art and power. At the beginning of the 20th century, Zuloaga, who lived and worked in Paris for a long time, was considered as great an artistic event as Pablo Picasso, the other Spaniard in Paris.

In Germany, the Schulte art salon in Berlin showed him in 1900, where Rainer Maria Rilke discovered his paintings. He is so moved by them that two years later, when he is writing his book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, he absolutely wants to meet him. He notes: “Apart from Rodin, he was the only person with whom I touched deeply and for a long time during my stay in Paris and whose importance and value I feel and can say.” He even decides to write a monograph about the strange Spaniard ( which then remains unwritten).

Zuloaga’s fame grew rapidly until the First World War, then its international impact waned. The first major exhibition of his paintings was not shown again in Spain until 2019. In this country, the extensive exhibition “The Myth of Spain. Now shown in Hamburg (and previously in Munich). Ignacio Zuloaga” – with over eighty paintings, loans from all over the world, the first in over a hundred years.

How could what was once so well known become a great unknown? When you see the exhibition, the problem that is associated with this undoubtedly great artist gradually becomes apparent. It is obvious that Zuloaga sees himself in the tradition of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. His themes: Spanish Catholicism, which he hates and against which he sets a kind of mystical popular piety, bullfighting as folklore and bloody seriousness at the same time, the mystery woman (only his cousins, whom he often paints, are allowed to laugh without ulterior motive) and of course the Figure of the sad knight Don Quixote.

All of this is part of the myth of Spain, which gave the title to this exhibition curated by Nerina Santorius and Carlos Alonso Pérez-Fajardo. This asks about the power of tradition in relation to the traditionless present – and the artistic means to make this contradiction visible.

When Zuloaga was celebrated in Paris in 1900, a Spanish jury rejected his painting “On the Eve of the Corrida” (1898) for the Paris World Exhibition (the Belgian state eventually acquired it). There is obviously something about Zuloaga’s images, which draw from tradition, that offends, perhaps even repels, traditionalists. And Picasso? It is currently in its blue period and shows the misery of beggars and the hopelessness of love in provocative monochromatic style. Picasso also drew on Spanish tradition; bullfighting, for example, remained a lifelong theme for him. But the will to create his own form is the decisive driving force for him. Zuloaga, on the other hand, remains attached to the tradition of the work, but also alienates it, sometimes through pathetic exaggeration or ironic refraction, sometimes through colored background surfaces that deliberately appear anti-naturalistic.

Did the painter Zuloaga, who was successful throughout Europe, not move decisively enough away from the orbit of backward Spain? His later fate seems to confirm this theory. In this he felt similar to Francisco de Goya, who on the one hand created “The Execution of the Insurgents” (1814) and on the other hand feared the power of the Inquisition, so much so that he painted the family of King Charles IV in search of protection. In the picture you can see the king and queen then, according to a caustic contemporary critic, “like a baker and his wife after winning the lottery.” In desperation, Goya signaled to posterity that he was not just a court painter after all. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote his Goya novel about the almost insoluble contradiction between art and power, and Konrad Wolf – behind him the trauma of the SED’s “clear-cutting plenum” in 1965, which tried to drive freedom out of art – wrote his still highly topical Goya novel about it. Movie.

Zuloaga also struggles for independence and distance from the dominant tradition and the church. There is a lot to discover in Zuloaga’s world of images. Almost black skies and glowing faces! In “The Victim of the Fiesta” (1910) we see a bullfighter riding past in a picturesque landscape after his fight. He keeps his spear lowered, as does his head. The white horse he is sitting on trots forward with his eyes closed. Bright red blood sticks to the white fur. Is Cervantes’ Don Quxote passing by on his Rocinante? The tired bullfighter’s face seems to have an uncomprehending coarseness.

Where have I seen this face before? Just now in the room next door, in the picture “The Cardinal” (1912), where an old man who is apparently unable to think about anything anymore is sitting on his armchair in a magnificent red robe, looking over a landscape as if he were sitting here in the theater. In fact, I then find out that Zuloaga painted his favorite model here: an old, rather ugly farmer.

So Zuloaga is not without subtlety and evil wit. But because he can make his colors shine in such unusual ways, even when he paints in a more monochromatic or tone-on-tone manner (as in his 1917 portrait of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset), he is becoming increasingly popular as a portrait painter – and can hardly save from orders. One would like to talk about his “famous” portraits, but these have not been shown in exhibitions for over a hundred years. This also applies to the “Portrait of Dona Rosita Gutiérrez” (1914/15), an old woman frozen in dignity with a black dress and a fan, which the museum in Bilbao bought in 1915 in the belief that she was a noble lady. In reality, however, it depicts an elderly Spanish prostitute and brothel owner in Paris.

The success of his portraits probably also lay in a stylization that has something manneristic about it. He once said that he wasn’t interested in superficial similarity, that’s what photography was for. There is also a magnificent painting by Anna de Noailles from 1913, at least at first glance. The infamous Parisian salon lady lies stretched out like a beautiful reptile in an imaginary sofa landscape and looks lurking at the viewer. Is he a worthwhile sacrifice? In any case, Rilke was constantly on the run from the stalkers of the noisy and intrusive lady who constantly recited love poems (her own).

But why was Zuloaga so suddenly forgotten, or should we say, thrust into the darkness of oblivion? The exhibition does not remain silent about this either, because it is part of the life and work history of the painter, who died in 1945. Spanish traditionalism had radicalized him after the First World War and Zuloaga had developed into a militant nationalist. And while Picasso painted his picture “Guernica” as an indictment of fascist violence, Zuloaga had the misfortune that General Franco liked his pictures. In this painter’s life, aesthetic and moral categories collide in the assessment of art. Man fails, but perhaps his works are wiser than he?

»Myth of Spain. Ignacio Zuloaga 1870 – 1945”, until May 26th, Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg