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Indepth Arts News:
"The Spanish Portrait from El Greco to Picasso"
2004-10-22 until 2005-02-06
Museo del Prado
Madrid, ,
ES Spain
This October sees the opening at the Museo del Prado of a
major exhibition:
The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso, sponsored
by BBVA. The
exhibition features 84 paintings, some of which have never
been shown before
in Spain and others that have never been lent, such as
Portrait of Don
Justino Neve by Murillo from the National Gallery in London
or The Duchess
of Alba by Goya and Portrait of a Girl by Velázquez, both
from the Hispanic
Society of America. The exhibition is the first one to
offer a complete
overview of the Spanish portrait from its origins up to the
early
twentieth-century avant-garde.
Over the course of three and a half months and through a
selection of 84
works, the exhibition devoted to the Spanish portrait will
present a survey
of the development of this genre in Spanish art from the
late fifteenth
century to the early decades of the twentieth century. The
exhibition is an
unprecedented one, in that it is the first to cover 500
years of Spanish art
from the viewpoint of the portrait. It features an
outstanding group of
works by all the leading names of in this field, including
El Greco, Ribera,
Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Goya, Miró and Picasso, the
latter represented
for the first time inside the Prado. All previous
investigations of this
subject, whether books or exhibitions, have focused on
narrower time scales
and have been less ambitious in scope. For this reason The
Spanish Portrait.
From El Greco to Picasso offers the first opportunity to
present the
stylistic evolution of the Spanish portrait, the different
social
implications of the genre in Spain, the self-image
formulated by the various
sitters, the image they wished to convey to posterity, and
the various
devices and representational strategies used by artists of
each period.
More than half the works in the exhibition are loans from
the most important
collections of Spanish portraits. Among them are a large
number of
masterpieces, including Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino by
El Greco (Boston,
Museum of Fine Arts), Alonso Verdugo de Albornoz, by
Francisco Zurbarán
(Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie), The
Infanta Margarita
in a Blue Dress, and Infante Felipe Próspero, by Velázquez
(Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum), Portrait of Don Justino Neve, by
Murillo (London,
National Gallery), Self-Portrait by Luis Meléndez (Paris,
Musée du Louvre),
the two full-length portraits of the Duchess of Alba by
Goya (Madrid,
Fundación Casa de Alba and New York, The Hispanic Society
of America), to be
exhibited together for the first time, Self-portrait with
Doctor Arrieta, by
Goya (The Minneapolis Institute of Arts), The Family of the
Infante don
Luis, by Goya (Parma, Fundazioni Magnani-Rocca), Gertrude
Stein, by Picasso
(New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Self-Portrait, by
Picasso (Paris,
Musée Picasso), and Self-Portrait by Miró) (Paris, Musée
Picasso).
Some of the major works traveling to the Prado are being
lent for the first
time. Amongst these: Portrait of a Girl by Velázquez from
the Hispanic
Society of America; the Duchess of Alba by Goya, also from
the Hispanic
Society and Portrait of Don Justino Neve by Murillo from
the National
Gallery in London.
The collection of the Museo del Prado includes some of the
most important
examples of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Spanish
portraits to be found
in any collection world-wide, and its own contribution to
the exhibition
thus includes major works such as the Knight with his Hand
on his Breast by
El Greco, Las Meninas, which has not been included in any
temporary
exhibition since the Velázquez exhibition in 1990, the
Portrait of a Man
known as the Pope‚s Barber, also by Velázquez, The Countess
of Chinchón, and
The Family of Charles IV by Goya.
The exhibition, curated by Javier Portús, will take place
in the Central
Gallery and Room 12 of the Museum. An accompanying
catalogue (Spanish and
English editions) will be published which, given the
innovative nature of
the exhibition, is expected to be a new reference-point for
future studies
of this subject. It includes contributions by Javier
Portús, Pilar Silva,
Miguel Falomir, Leticia Ruiz, José Álvarez, Alfonso Pérez
Sánchez, Gabriele
Finaldi, Manuel Mena, Nigel Glendinning, José Luis Díez and
Javier Barón.
IMAGE
Self-portrait
Pablo Picasso
París, Museo Picasso
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