Bermejo is one of the greatest Spanish artists of the second half of the 15th century.
This exhibition, in the National Gallery’s Room 1, brings two of his masterpieces: the triptych of the ‘Madonna of Montserrat’ from the cathedral at Acqui Terme, Alessandria (Italy) and the ‘Piedad Desplà’ from Barcelona Cathedral, to the UK for the first time.
In addition, The National Gallery’s own painting by Bermejo, the magnificent ‘Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil‘, returns on display following its recent conservation, revealing the painting’s exquisite details and the extent of Bermejo’s artistry.
Click here for more information, andclick here for ARTES’ Study Morning in the exhibiton (27 June 2019).
ARTES’s AGM will take place at the V&A at 12:30 on 13 June 2019. It will be followed by a group visit to look at objects from the Iberian world in the 16th Century.
Meet at the V&A, Exhibition Road Reception, at 11:50. Sandwich lunch (GBP 5) and AGM from 12–2, followed by a group visit to look at objects from the Iberian world in the 16th and early 17th centuries.
***Attendees are asked to arrive punctually, as late arrivals may be difficult to accommodate***
Please contact artesiberia@gmail.com to book a place.
The visual arts in Spain have long been haunted by the spectres of six giants: El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya and Picasso. Still today, these canonical figures tower over all others and continue to shape the story of Spanish art, which has been traditionally told in monographic form. Although the strength of the Spanish canon has informed different disciplines (literature, aesthetics, performing arts), given the recent ‘material turn’, the prosopographical dimension of the visual arts in Spain poses a disciplinary challenge. Similarly, following the ‘global turn’, the visual arts of Iberia pose a geographical challenge, intersecting with the Mediterranean, Arabic, Latin American, British and continental European worlds. The notions of ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanish art’, therefore, are necessarily nebulous and problematic, raising a host of questions: To what extent does Spanish art exist before the establishment of Spain as a nation state? To what extent is the art of the Habsburg and Bourbon empires a Spanish art outside Spain? What is the role of Spain in the wider canon of European art? Who has exploited the visual arts of the Hispanic world, geographically, politically and intellectually? These questions ultimately point to a tension between canons and repertoires; between centres and peripheries; and between consolidating the ‘core’ and expanding the ‘remit’ of the so-called Spanish school.
This conference will explode the disciplinary, material and geographical limits of Spanish art, inaugurating the Zurbarán Centre as a critical and innovative research institution for the study of Spanish and Latin American art in the twenty-first century. Papers will challenge the canonical construction of Spanish art, which can be traced back to writings from Palomino’s Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors (1724) to Stirling Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848), to more recent publications by scholars in the field. Papers will also probe the chronological, geographical and material boundaries of the ‘El Greco to Goya’ survey, interrogating the ways in which academics, curators, scholars and teachers narrate this material through various platforms, including publications, museum displays, exhibitions, lectures, gallery talks and academic courses. Speakers will address the various ‘terrains’ of Spanish art, from geographical constructions of Iberia as Europe’s frontier or edge, to exchange with all that lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
Nigel Glendinning and the Hispanic Research Journal: A Unique Voice in Spanish Cultural History Sarah Symmons (University of Essex)
11.05 – 11.20
Discussion
11.20 – 11.50
Tea & Coffee
11.50 – 12.50
Keynote Lecture: Passion and Prejudice:Attitudes to Spanish Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Britain Holly Trusted (Victoria & Albert Museum, London)
13.00 – 14.00
Lunch
14.00 – 15.15
Session 2: Geographies Chair: Edward Payne (Durham University)
14.00 – 14.20
Beyond El Greco:The Travelling Artist between Italy and Spain—Artistic Translation and the Sixteenth-Century Hispanic Canon Piers Baker-Bates (The Open University)
14.20 – 14.40
Maestros españoles en Chile: Espacios y repertorios Marcela Drien (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile)
14.40 – 15.00
Geographic Limits and the History of the Spanish Avant-Garde Maite Barragán (Albright College, Reading PA)
15.00 – 15.15
Discussion
15.15 – 16.30
Session 3: Strategies Chair: Tom Stammers (Durham University)
15.15 – 15.35
Genaro Pérez Villaamil: Navigating Stereotypes Claudia Hopkins (University of Edinburgh)
15.35 – 15.55
Imaginary Architecture as Imagined Community: ‘The Market’ by Jenaro Pérez Villaamil Matilde Mateo (Syracuse University)
15.55 – 16.15
Hieroglyphs of Providence: Pelegrín Clavé and Isabella I of Castile Stefano Cracolici (Durham University)
16.15 – 16.30
Discussion
16.30 – 17.00
Tea & Coffee
17.00 – 18.00
Keynote Lecture Canons and Repertoires in Hispanic Art: What does StirlingMaxwell have to do with them? Hilary Macartney (University of Glasgow)
Friday 21 June 2019
9.30 – 10.00
Tea & Coffee
10.00 – 11.15
Session 4: Identities Chair: Giovanna Capitelli (Università Roma Tre)
10.00 – 10.20
El arte español más allá de la península ibérica:¿Qué significa ser un ‘artista español en la Nueva España’? Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández (Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México)
10.20 – 10.40
Constructing the Monuments of the Nation:Victor Balaguer and the Struggle to Shape Monasteries as Spanishness Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes (Newcastle University)
10.40 – 11.00
Thinking Spain from Barcelona:The Iconographic Repertoire of Spanish Art (1918–1922) Lucila Mallart (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
The Maius Workshop’s next event will take place at 4:30–5:30 pm on 3 June 2019 at QMUL (Arts Two, room 2.18).
We are delighted to welcome Emily Floyd, Lecturer in Visual Culture
and Art before 1700 at UCL, for a conversation on her forthcoming
article, ‘The Word as Object in Colonial South America’. A draft of the article will be pre-circulated, and Emily looks forward to the group’s comments and questions.
Please email maiusworkshop@gmail.com to sign up to this free event.
***How to find Arts Two, room 2.18: the Arts Two building is number 35 on the campus map at this link.
The campus is best accessed through the East Gate entrance. Please note
that the Arts Two building does not have an entrance on Mile End Road.
The 58th Biennale of Venice opened on 11 May. Here is a
(non-comprehensive) list of Iberian and Latin American artists represented at
the exhibition, which runs until 24 November 2019, and at accompanying events.
Mexican artist Teresa Margolles was awarded a Special
Mention at the event’s opening ceremony. By shifting existing structures from
the real world into the Exhibition halls, Margolles creates sharp and poignant
works that deal with the plight of women grossly affected by the narcotics
trade in her native country. Her work Muro
Ciudad Juárez. 2010 can be found in the Biennale’s central pavilion at the
Giardini, entitled May You Live in Interesting Times and curated by Ralph
Rugoff.
Other Latin American artists invited to participate in the Biennale’s international exhibition (split between the Giardini and Arsenale) are Jill Mulleady (born in 1980 in Uruguay), Gabriel Rico (born in 1980 in Mexico) and Tomás Saraceno (born in 1973 in Argentina).
The international exhibition is accompanied by 89 national participations. Spain’s pavilion, located at the entrance of the Giardini, showcases Perforated, a collaboration between Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego. Through performance, video, and sound, Okariz explores the displacements between the subject, the language, and its physical presence. Prego’s sculptural works relate to architecture, calling materiality into question through the use of lightweight, flexible materials that allow the form to only exist in a specific state or as a result of a continuous action on the constituent material. Both artists reiterate the alternative functions of the body in our technified society.
Brazil’s pavilion, Swinguerra, takes its title from a combination of swingueira, a popular dance movement in the north-east of Brazil, and guerra, war. Wagner & de Burca’s work focuses on the powerful expressions of popular culture in contemporary Brazil, and their complex relationship with international and local traditions.
In Uruguay’s
exhibition, La casa empática, paintings, drawings, photographs, and
mural works by Yamandú Canosa are arranged as a ‘landscape-territory’ of the
world, an inclusive and empathic ‘total landscape’. The total landscape is
completed by the intervention on the facade and by the starry sky installed in
the ceiling of the pavilion.
Metáfora
de las tres ventanas. Venezuela: Identidad en tiempo y espaciois the pavilion of Venezuela.
Three metaphorical windows— thresholds for light, air, and the gaze—symbolise
the long construction of collective history and an all-encompassing narrative filled
with challenges and rebellion. Venezuela aims to promote its libertarian
identity, woven over the centuries, and share it in a clear gesture of
invitation to the complicity of others.
Other national pavilions are located in the Arsenale. Argentina’s
exhibition, El nombre de un país/The Name of a Country is a punk,
Frankensteinish bestiary that flaunts a high-fashion collection attitude. Mariana
Telleria traces a highway with an infinite number of linguistic lanes,
activating confusion—mixing things together, building monsters—and sustaining
viewers’ awareness in a continual state of transit.
In Chile’s
Pavilion, Altered Views, Voluspa Jarpa offers a proposal for
decolonisation through a review of European history. Altered Views
comprises three reversed cultural spaces/models: the Hegemony Museum,
the Subaltern Portrait Gallery, and the Emancipating Opera. The
project collects concepts that defined colony: race and cross-breeding,
subordinate male subjects, cannibalism, gender, civilisation and barbarism,
monarchy and republic, appealing to a critical view from a transtemporal
journey.
Mexicois represented by Actos de dios/Acts of God by Pablo
Vargas Lugo. This exhibition which speculates on the life of Christ to generate
a non-linear narrative that raises new questions. What would happen if the man
who was chosen to redeem humanity had set out to fulfil all the predictions
made by the prophets about his life without being certain that he could
accomplish them?
“Indios antropófagos”. A butterfly
Garden in the (Urban) Jungle, the exhibition of Peru,
is a paradox: a post-conceptual exploration of the fiery sensory impact of
Amazon culture on certain (neo)Baroque horizons in Peruvian art, namely in Christian
Bendayán’s work, where it is energised by a critical reconsideration of the
Amazon as a constructed image.
Other national exhibitions are dotted around Venice. In Cannaregio, the Dominican Republic presents Naturaleza y biodiversidad en la República Dominicana. This is the country’s first independent national pavilion at the Biennale. It offers a reflection on ecological threats affecting the luxuriant local nature, the Earth and humankind.
Next to the Dominican Republic is Guatemala’s
Interesting State. The term
‘interesting state’ evokes a woman who is pregnant. Acts of violence against
women constitute the denial of existence. Guatemala is an ‘interesting State’ because
of the persistence of this devastating phenomenon. Art therefore becomes an
ethical instrument, in which the seductive aesthetic nature of the works is
there to serve an indispensable social denunciation and an essential
opportunity for redemption.
Portugal’s pavilion, a seam, a surface, a hinge or a knot, features artist Leonor Antunes reflecting on the functions of everyday objects and contemplating their potential to be materialised as abstract sculptures. The artist is interested in how craftsmanship traditions from various cultures intersected in the work of Venetians such as Carlo Scarpa, Savina Masieri and Egle Trincanato. Elements of the exhibition are fabricated with Falegnameria Augusto Capovilla, one of the still-active Venetian carpentries that worked closely with Scarpa.
The Cubanpavilion, located on the island of San Servolo and entitled A cautionary environment/Entorno aleccionador brings together installations, paintings, and interdisciplinary works on allegorical themes of the times in which we live. The invited artists, Alejandro Campins, Ariamna Contino, Alex Hernández and Eugenio Tibaldi, discuss the relationship between man and the environment.
The Biennale’s programme is accompanied by a series of collateral events. Catalonia
in Venice’s To Lose
Your Head (Idols) documents the complex life of statues, which some
artists today recreate and reflect upon. This multi-authored exhibition
explores the theory of art reception and documents the complex life of public
statues in our time. In a world of images, iconoclasm and iconodulia, it questions
the fetishism of images as living entities and encourages conversations as a
way to foster human happiness, awareness and freedom.
The latest works by the
contemporary Portuguese sculptor Joana
Vasconcelos (born 1971) are being displayed under the title What
are you hiding? May you find what you are looking for at the
Venice Biennale on the island of San Clemente across the Palazzo Kempinsky
gardens and in the church of San Clemente itself, supported by the film
production company MGM. In the church the exhibition shows her large-scale
floor sculpture Madragoa (2015–2019),
inspired by Lisbon’s buildings and façades, which explores the intersections of
sculpture, architecture and painting. This piece has new elements specially
created for it since it was first shown in Macau in 2015. In the gardens
Vasconcelos is displaying I’ll be Your
Mirror #1 (2019), a giant Venetian carnival mask made of mirrors, which the
sculptor recently showed at the Guggenheim, Bilbao in a solo show. Also on show
in the gardens is Betty Boop PA
(2019), a high-heeled shoe crafted out of saucepans, which proposes a revision
of the “feminine” in today’s world by bringing together two tropes of a woman’s
private and public image.
Pablo Picasso, Olga Pensive (winter 1923), Musée national Picasso-Paris (c) RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris)/Mathieu Rabeau, Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2018
The Museo Picasso Málaga presents Picasso’s first wife Olga Khokhlova and her story in the first show of its 2019 exhibition calendar. The exhibition Olga Picasso was inspired by the letters and photographs found in the travel trunk of the Russian dancer, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso’s grandmother. The exhibition focuses on the years of Olga’s relationship with Picasso. It offers context on the creation of some of Picasso’s greatest works, connecting them with a personal story that developed alongside another, political and social, story.
Olga Khokhlova (Nezhin, Ukraine, 1891– Cannes, France, 1955) was the daughter of a colonel in the Russian Imperial Army. In 1911 she joined the prestigious and innovative Ballet Russes company, which was at that time highly successful in Europe under the direction of Serguei Diaghilev. She first met Pablo Picasso in Rome in the spring of 1917, when the artist was designing the sets and costumes for the ballet Parade. They were married in Paris, on 12th July 1918, and their first and only child, Paul, was born in February 1921. The couple separated in 1935, although they remained married until Olga’s death in Cannes, in 1955.
The Russian ballerina’stravel trunk, which her son received when he inherited the chateau of Boisgeloup—currently owned by the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA)—contained previously unseen letters and photographs. For many years, the drawers harboured Kodak envelopes full of photos that told the story of Bernard’s grandparents, their life together, their travels, Picasso’s ateliers and more. In other compartments lay hundreds of letters in French and Russian, tied with little pink or blue silk ribbons. Olga’s trunk, engraved with her initials, also held her dance attire, ballet shoes, tutus, programmes and such personal objects as a Crucifix and a Russian Orthodox Bible. The contents of the trunk, which was the only personal belonging Olga kept after her separation from Picasso, revealed new aspects of the artist’s work during their relationship.
Approximately 350 itemswill be shown in the exhibition, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, letters, documents and films. It has been jointly curated by Émilia Philippot, conservator of the Musée national Picasso-Paris; Joachim Pissarro, professor of art history and director of Hunter College Art Gallery (New York); and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, co-chair of the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, FABA, president of the Executive Board of Museo Picasso Málaga and member of its Board of Trustees. The exhibition has been adapted for Museo Picasso Málaga by José Lebrero, the museum’s artistic director, and Sofía Díaz, its exhibitions coordinator.
The exhibition will travel from Málaga to Madrid, where it will be on show at the CaixaForum from 19 June to 22 September 2019. Click here for details.
ARTES members are cordially invited to an informal study morning in the exhibition Bartolomé Bermejo: Master of the Spanish Renaissance, which will open on 12 June at the National Gallery, London (until 29 September 2019).
Programme (27 June 2019)
9:00 am: Meet at The National Gallery’s West Entrance (Staff Entrance to the left of the main portico on Trafalgar Square)
9:15 am: Welcome, curator’s introduction and discussion in the exhibition (led by Letizia Treves)
11:00–11:20 am: Complimentary tea and coffee in the Former Viewing Room, Wilkins Building
11:20–11:30 am: Brief overview of the exhibition Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (Akemi Herráez) in the Former Viewing Room
11:30 am: Self-guided tour (complimentary tickets will be provided) of Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (Sainsbury Wing, Level -2)
Attendees may leave their belongings at the West Entrance on
arrival. After 11.30 am these must be checked into the Gallery’s cloakrooms. Large
bags and suitcases may not be brought into the Gallery.
Please note that this study morning is by invitation only. Numbers are strictly limited and places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. We kindly ask you to RSVP to colloquia.RSVP@ng-london.org.uk by Thursday 6 June 2019.
The Maius Workshop’s next event will take place at 4:30–5:30 pm on 3 June 2019 at QMUL (Arts Two, room 2.18).
We are delighted to welcome Emily Floyd, Lecturer in Visual Culture
and Art before 1700 at UCL, for a conversation on her forthcoming
article, ‘The Word as Object in Colonial South America’. A draft of the article will be pre-circulated, and Emily looks forward to the group’s comments and questions.
Please email maiusworkshop@gmail.com to sign up to this free event.
***How to find Arts Two, room 2.18: the Arts Two building is number 35 on the campus map at this link.
The campus is best accessed through the East Gate entrance. Please note
that the Arts Two building does not have an entrance on Mile End Road.
Specialist Workshop “Golden Age Art and Globalization in Madrid’s Museums” Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, September 2–12 2019 Deadlinefor applications: Jun 2, 2019
Many of the objects that are admired today in Spain’s major museums arrived here in the Early Modern period. Collections of art, artifacts, and objects—everythig from paintings and sculptures to armor, textiles, feathers, books, exotic shells and even animal horns transmitted a variety of meanings, many of which are lost to the average museum visitor today.
Understanding these objects (their origins, how they arrived and how they were seen) introduces students to a deeper appreciation of how Spanish history and identity has been and is created in relationship with the rest of the world, and especially with Spanish-speaking America and Asia. The course will explore these issues using ten selected objects that will provide a view of early globalization focusing on questions raised by the objects themselves. One of the topics to analyze will be the relationship of art to diplomacy, seeking to shed light on the value of paintings of distant places, peoples and animals as “proof” or “document” in the age before photography, or the place of “the others” (non-Europeans) in the history of Spanish and European societies in general, both in the past and in today’s globalized and multicultural world. Attention will also be paid to questions such as commerce, consumption, religion, and gender in a world of travelling objects and persons, always with an emphasis on elucidating how these travels created new meanings for objects in new contexts.
This course has a practical, object-based character, with practically all of the sessions taking place in museums, libraries and other collections in Madrid and its surroundings. Presentations and discussions will take place in fromt of the objects themselves. This experience will help students to work with objects and to be aware of the material aspects of globalization, further from what is expressed in academic texts and articles. It is expected too that all will feel something of the fascination and intrigue experienced by contemporaries who saw these things for the first time.
The art dealers Gagosian, New York,in partnership with members of the Picasso family, present an exhibition in honour of their late friend and colleague, Sir John Richardson, the eminent biographer of Picasso who died in March 2019. The exhibition Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline, features paintings and sculptures showing the central role and influence of the many women in Picasso’s life.
The exhibition runs until 22 June 2019 at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Richardson had previously organized six major exhibitions of Picasso’s work at Gagosian. In the early 1960s, John Richardson was planning to write a study of Picasso’s portraits and spent hours with the artist, poring over reproductions of his works. As Picasso spoke about the complexities of his pictorial thinking—pointing out, for example, that a portrait of Dora Maar might also contain elements referring to her romantic predecessor Marie-Thérèse Walter, and her successor Françoise Gilot—Richardson began to believe that a detailed biographical treatment of Picasso’s portraiture would close a notable gap in Picasso scholarship. Decades later he would sit down to write what would become the monumental multivolume biography, A Life of Picasso.
Picasso was as eclectic in his choice of muse as he was in style: the bohemian Fernande Olivier; disciplined Olga Khokhlova; blonde Venus Marie-Thérèse; passionate artists Dora and Françoise; Sylvette David, the young woman with a high ponytail; and Jacqueline Roque, the devoted, romantic beauty. Not merely mute muses, Fernande and Françoise published memoirs; Olga and Marie-Thérèse kept extensive archives of photographs and letters over decades; Dora gave interviews to researchers and documented Picasso’s work and private life in photographs.
Bermejo is one of the greatest Spanish artists of the second half of the 15th century.
ARTES 