Woman from Madrid by Zuloaga, ca. 1913. Recorded live on March 22, 2023
hello everyone and welcome back to another of our weekly sessions in English here at the Prada Museum just a few minutes before the museum opens this is a program that’s put together with the generous support of the American Friends of the Prada Museum and today we’re going to be talking about Ignacio zuluaga suluwaga came from a family of artists and Artisans like so many painters that we have here at the Museum his father was a metal worker his uncle was a ceramicist and he was born in 1870 in a small town in Northern Spain in The Basque country but by the beginning of the 20th century he had made a name for himself all throughout Europe and North America although perhaps the most difficult market for him to break into was Spain and today we’re going to see a little bit about why that is so in the first place let’s take a minute to think about why this painting is here many of you probably think of older paintings here at the Prada Museum not from the 20th century but that started to change over time here at The Prado we have paintings by Joaquin saroya by Maria Blanchard even at Picasso paintings that help us understand other Collections and especially of course the 19th century collection this was part of a donation in 2019 from a German collector who spent most of his life in Spain Hans Rudolph gerstenmeyer filawaga really recognized his own admiration for the Old Masters of Spanish painting too like El Greco and Roberta Velazquez Goya furbaran all painters that we can find here at The Prado Museum he painted many portraits often group portraits and often in urban settings in small towns in Castile and here we have a portrait from around 1913 of a Manola or a Maha a Manola is a woman from Madrid in the 18th and 19th century in belonging normally to a lower or middle class who would be recognized for her dress and this woman in the 20th century is dressed like Manola and they were known for this extreme version of traditional Spanish attire and also recognize for their attitude both men and women manolos and manolas had a reputation of being bold and proud a Little Bit Sassy they were Brazen and a stylish and really a favorite subject of painters like Goya and this lady is wearing a mantilla a white Monty Young and it looks like maybe she’s dressed to go to a bull fight that would have been a time that a young single woman it would have been appropriate for a young single woman to wear a white mantilla luaga also liked to play with this kind of image of a cropped figure placed with a distant landscape the landscape is very concise succinct it’s something that he learned from his friend Emil Bernard this kind of landscape that’s really reduced to its most essential elements also notice her her dark eyes painted women’s eyes like this several times with this mixture both of makeup but also of shadow to accentuate facial features and makeup and it kind of gives it adds more character but it also even adds kind of a femme fatale kind of feeling to this figure she looks bold and seductive and even dangerous there’s also a scene on the fan that she’s holding here it doesn’t look like it’s a scene that belongs to the time that this was painted it looks like it’s a little bit older so it might be an antique it might be something that she inherited and that could speak of her social position if this were an antique fan it could be an upper-class woman embracing tradition and thulu August paintings really feel like they are searching for this a temporality by capturing modern interpretations of tradition continuities of tradition and this brings us to some of the difficulties with thuluaga’s painting the way that he painted tradition and Spanish culture and so we’re going to see why that’s a little bit difficult here in fact he’s an artist that historians are continuing to discover to ReDiscover and reconsider because of the image that he painted of Spain and how that was accepted abroad after 1898 when Spain lost the last of its Imperial possessions there was really a national cultural crisis and debate with regard to national identity whether traditions and customs should be embraced and promoted or whether they were part of the reason for the country’s decadence stereotypes that needed to be left behind to step into or to show an image of Spain ready to participate in Cosmopolitan modern Europe many of the luaga’s darker paintings of Spanish culture showed Traditions but also poverty and deep religiosity it was not the image that Spain wanted to promote of itself stepping into the 20th century which is one of the reasons that he hard time had a hard time breaking into the market here although his painting would be defended by most of the group of poets and essays and philosophers of the generation of 98. but even the generation of 98 thought that thuluaga’s images like this one a little bit lighter were often Pastiche and a little bit more suited to foreign taste that we’re looking for a romantic idea of Spain less appropriate for the Spanish Market and that these kinds of continuations of stereotypes were misleading and damaging to the projection of images of Spain abroad tying it to ideas of exoticism and backwardness some of the first International Travelers that came to Spain were English and French men and women and as part of the Romantic Movement they were Travelers that of course were interested in myth and the sublime and exoticism and they found a lot of those things in southern Spain in Andalusia and when they went back home they brought with them these exaggerated ideas of romantic portrayals of Spanish culture of Flamenco dancers and Gypsies and bull fighters on the other hand others like Jose Ortega identified fluaga with a Rejuvenation of traditional Styles rooted in the greatest Spanish painters like Velasquez which could offer a much needed alternative for Modern Art resisting what he thought was a decline in the Arts due to the rise in democracy and the dehumanization of culture so all of this goes to show how behind a beautiful portrait there’s so much more to research and so much more to debate and even more so perhaps when it’s an image like this one of Spanish tradition and culture so thank you for joining us today for our weekly session in English and we’ll see you again next Wednesday
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