English
This is the exhibition which opens to the public on October 9th and closes at the beginning of January of next year in the Parisian Musée d´Orsay, one of those exhibitions that are so popular among the art-loving crowd as well as the specialists in this field. Under the title ´Spain in two centuries. From Zuloaga to Picasso´, it offers a selection of the best of the Spanish pictorial scene from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The collaborators are the museum where it´s exhibited and the MAPFRE Foudnation, also the owner of a remarkable collection of paintings of the time. Despite the heterogeneity of the selected pieces, the exhibition maintains its single purpose, which is the influence of the Parisian cultural atmosphere on Spanish painters in the last few decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th.
And it´s not strange that this connexion exists, because Paris, around about the mid-1800s and until very recently, has been the artistic focus of the whole world. Poets and writers, musicians and composers, film makers and showbiz people and sculptors and painters used to go to the French capital all the time. Around its bohemian neighbourhoods we would find those who now fill up the art books and that´s where, one after the other, the artistic avant-gardes were born. The saturation was such that the manifests used to run over each other. Of course, the Spanish creators could not be immune to such strong attraction, and anyone who wanted to be someone in the world of art and creation ended up in Paris. The first ones, the ones who are from late-impressionism such as Casals or Sorolla, despite still having their own style, added themselves to the way of doing things that the Parisian artists had. The ones who arrived afterwards, headed by Miró, Dalí and the great Picasso (who deserves a special chapter), revolutionized the artistic scene, going from imitating to being imitated.
The commissioners have divided the exhibition in two stages, and the first one, at the same time, in two other stages. In an initial stage, the landscapes and the popular themes that were imposing themselves in these two different views which we have come to call the two Spains: the black and dark one of Zuloaga and Solana and the luminous one of the Catalan and Eastern artists (Sorolla, Anglada-Camarasa or Casals). The second stage, with the arrival of the avant-gardes, is starred by Miró and Dalí and the revolutionary genius that was Pablo Picasso, who made of Paris and the whole of France his home. We have to remember that the work that was the starting point to modernity (´The Young Ladies of Avignon´) happened at such an early date as 1907, when post-impressionism was on its last legs.
The exhibition, being organized in a chronological way, can give a clear idea of the evolution of these Spanish artists who ended up, in their day, in Paris. Like everything which is organized by this magnificent gallery that is the Musée d´Orsay, it looks excellent. Remember that the exhibition will be available in the annex of the Orangerie. The practical data are available on the museum´s website:
Any of the magnificent apartments in Paris can be used as a base to explore all of this artistic universe.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
