FROM EL GRECO TO DALI

4/07/10, Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Paris

A misleading title for a nonetheless satisfying exhibition of works by Spanish masters from a collection (Perez-Simon) in Mexico, never before exhibited in France, in a museum housed in one of Paris's most spectacular mansions.

The El Greco was a huge disappointment: a head and shoulders portrait of Christ, little bigger than a postage stamp. There was lots of Dali. Some Picasso. Some Joan Miro. Some (enormously kitsch) Murillos. Several powerful pictures of agonised saints by Jose de Ribera, full of chiaroscuro effects.

But the highlight for me was Joaquin Sorolla, the man who seems to have brought impressionism to Spain with his brightly-lit and brightly-coloured canvases and bold brushstrokes. The earliest Sorolla was painted in the 1870s, a terrace near Naples overlooking the sea reminiscent of a David Roberts watercolour in the handling of Mediterranean light filtered through the vine leaves on the pergola. There were oil sketches of naked boys in the sea and of a gnarled fisherman's face. A specatcular large picture of the fish being brought ashore and sorted in baskets on the beach. A great swirly image of cattle being driven into the surf. A nude woman emerging from bathing in the sea. A portrait of a fellow artist in severe black.



Searching for a Sorolla picture to illustrate this post I find lots, but few from the Perez-Simon collection (an indication perhaps of how unfamiliar many of the paintings in the collection must be compared to those in major galleries), and also a website that offers to sell you hand-painted copies of some of them (allow 14-21 days for delivery) which implies that I am not alone in my liking for them!



The museum itself started life as the home of a married couple, she (Nelie Jacquemart) an artist, he (Edouard Andre) filthy rich. There's a permanent collection of old masters, several rooms full of Italian Renaissance sculpture, woodcarving and the like (much of it built into the fabric), and a spectacular rococo staircase with a 15th century fresco by Tiepolo "rescued" from a Venetian villa and reassembled in Paris, though much of the colour has alas faded.

You enter via a grand gateway and tunnel from the Boulevard Hausmann and emerge into a large open space in which a double drive sweeps up from the tunnel (and a second tunnel at the far end of the property), curving back round and up to the front door, which thus faces away from the street; at the back of the house a there's a first-floor terrace above the street frontage. We arrived just as the Paris Harley-Davidson club was assembling for a (very noisy) meeting, grizzled men in leathers (and equally grizzled womenfolk) parking up four abreast along the boulevard before processing around the city. We saw them later jumping red lights and stopping the traffic near the Opera Garnier.

THE DISCOVERY OF SPAIN

17/8/09, Royal Academy


The National Galleries of Scotland old master blockbuster. Goya, El Greco, Velasquez, Zurbaran as represented in British collections, plus any number of British artists from the 18th century onwards and their responses to Spain.

A rag-bag, but a stimulating one. Goya's etchings of the horrors of war next to his portrait of the Duke of Wellington (and the preliminary sketch, in which the poor old duke looks absolutely shattered). Two version of the Maid of Saragossa (she fired the gun at the siege when her gunner husband was killed): in Goya's she is faceless, in silhouette, emblematic of defiant Spain; in David Wilkie's she is beautiful, fiery, the picture overwhelmed with unnecessary detail. Like many of the Brits' paintings of Spain it was, if not sentimental, then deeply self-indulgent.

The Brits loved Spain, painting endless bullfights and gypsies and funerals and exotic costumes and bustling streets. There was a striking big unfinished picture of boys playing at bullfighting by John Phillip. (There was a self-portrait in one picture, Phillip in Victorian suit and hat and fine moustache, sketching some gypsies: he was one of those painters whose preliminary sketches are so much more convincing than his finished oils.)

David Roberts was head and shoulders the finest British artist of the 19th century to visit Spain. The exhibition contained three crackers: his watercolour of the interior of Seville's cathedral, breathtakingly detailed and atmospheric; an oil of the Giralda in Seville; and an oil of a huge double staircase in Burgos cathedral, disappearing into the gloom, which S said looked positively three-dimensional.

There were several Zurbarans: an altar piece which could have been by anybody; and four examples from a set of 12 paintings of Joseph and his sons, lifesize, now (for some reason) in the collection of the Lord Bishop of Durham. The figures are all dressed in some exotic hybrid Mediterranean/Cossack/Arab garb, richly decorated with extraordinary detail and with all sorts of frills and furbelows: figures from a timeless fantasy world.

The El Grecos were wonderful, especially the woman in a fur wrap whose image is on the exhibition poster. Can this really be the same painter who produced the Tears of St Peter on the wall next to it (hands clasped, head tilted, looking up to heaven)? Or those great religious pictures full of reds and blues and whites and sharp folds, angular figures, which are so extraordinary in Toledo, a 20th century artist working 500 years ahead of his time?

Then there was a room full of British copies of Velasquez (presumably to make up for only having two minor examples of the real thing, plus one copy and one work by a pupil, in the exhibition). Least said about most of these the better with the excpetion of Millais's Souvenir of Velasquez, a picture of a girl reminiscent of V's Meninas, with a profusion of blonde hair, a very rich dress, bright pinky-red sleeves and unbelievably thick paint.

Lots of pictures of the Alhambra, including decoration from a mid-Victorian pattern-book by someone called Owen Jones (never heard of him, but very influential, apparently) derived from the Alhambra's decorations. David Muirhead Bone pictures of Granada in the 1920s and 30s especially detailed and colourful.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the Brits came for the bullfights etc (see above) but also discovered the Spanish light. There was a whole room full of the most glorious colour. Someone called Arthur Melville in particular produced watercolours full of deep saturated colour, especially the blue of water.

Finally, a rather disappointing room devoted to British artists and the Civil War, with some Picassos, some Edward Burras (overblown) and a Wyndham Lewis.