7th February 2019, 16:00 to 17:00, Room 146, Elvet Riverside 1, Durham UniversityPaintings by the Spanish Baroque artist, Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), prompted a range of contradictory responses in the nineteenth century. Poets, travel writers, critics and artists reacted to his work, especially his striking depictions of violent subjects, at once with admiration and displeasure. In his epic poem Don Juan (1823), Lord Byron declares that ‘Spagnoletto tainted / His brush with all the blood of all the sainted’, and in 1845, Théophile Gautier published two poems on the artist, referring to Ribera as ‘le noir Valencian’, and ‘plus dur que Jupiter’. While Byron and Gautier are often quoted in the literature on the artist, scholars have been swift to dismiss these responses as ‘muddying the waters’ of Ribera’s œuvre, and thus his reception during the nineteenth century has, until recently, received scant scholarly attention.
Through a close, comparative study of Ribera’s paintings and Gautier’s poems, this lecture will explore nineteenth-century attitudes towards extreme imagery in the context of the revival of the Spanish School in France. It will provide a more contextualised and nuanced account of Ribera’s reception during the nineteenth century, and demonstrate that Gautier’s poetic responses are not, in fact, distorting, but revealing. The lecture will argue for the significance of these poems by suggesting that Gautier calls attention to the problematic relationship between the act of inflicting torture and the art of representing pain, a tension which is central to an understanding of Ribera’s violent imagery, and to the myth-making of Ribera as a ‘violent’ artist.
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This exhibition opens the anniversary celebrations by offering a survey of the museum’s history that focuses on the dialogue between the Museum and society; heritage policies in Spain; the trends that have guided the growth of the museum’s collection and its transformation into a place that has allowed Spanish and foreign writers, intellectuals and artists to reflect on the country’s past and its collective identity.
Art at the court of Philip IV was an international language devoid of local boundaries. The work of Velázquez after 1623 is best understood in this international context. He was deeply influenced by paintings in the royal collections, especially works by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens. One of his key experiences was the trip to Rome in 1629 where he encountered classical and Renaissance art and established contacts with his contemporaries in Italy. The exhibition underscores such internationalism through a selection of 61 paintings associated with Velázquez, the Spanish royal collections and the Spanish Golden Age. More than twenty of these works were painted by Italian, Flemish and French artists, including Titian, Rubens, Luca Giordano, Jan Brueghel, Anthonis Mor, Giovanni Lanfranco, Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, Massimo Stanzione and Guido Reni. Spanish artists are represented through works by Ribera, Zurbarán, Murillo, Alonso Cano, Pereda, Maíno, Sánchez Coello, Mazo, Van der Hamen and others.
This exhibition focuses on Spanish drawing manuals of the 17th and 18th centuries, locating them in their international context. These rare and innovative manuals responded to changing trends in the theory and practice of art. While such learning aids were produced across Europe, this exhibition will highlight the unique features of Spanish examples through works by José de Ribera, Pedro de Villafranca y Malagón, José García Hidalgo, Friar Matías de Irala and José López Enguídanos.
This exhibition is the result of the research undertaken for the publication of a new catalogue raisonné of Goya’s drawings, a subject to which the Museo del Prado has always devoted particular attention and which is one of the keystones of its collection. The exhibition will bring together more than 100 drawings by Goya from the Prado’s own collections and from public and private ones around the world. It will be presented as an extensive chronological survey of the master’s oeuvre, ranging from the Italian Sketchbook to the Bordeaux Albums. It will also offer an up-to-date vision of the ideas that recurrently appear in Goya’s work, revealing the ongoing and long-lasting relevance of his thinking.
The exhibition will reveal the artistic personality of two of the most outstanding women artists in western art. Through a total of 60 works and for the first time, the Museo del Prado will jointly present the most important paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1535–1625) and Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). The two artists achieved recognition and fame among their contemporaries for and despite their status as female painters. Both were able to break away from the prevailing stereotypes assigned to women in relation to artistic practice and the deep-rooted scepticism regarding women’s creative and artistic abilities. In particular, Sofonisba Anguissola had close connections with the Spanish court as tutor to Queen Elizabeth of Valois and later official court painter to King Philip II.
This exhibition project will recreate the original aspect of Room 39, known as Their Majesties’ Retiring Room. First opened in 1828, it was intended as a portrait gallery of the Bourbon Dynasty. The images on display were accompanied by still lifes, floral compositions and landscapes and by other paintings that depict events from the reigns of Charles III and Ferdinand VII. This installation will recreate the hanging of the paintings at different heights and will include some of the furnishings made for this space, including Ferdinand VII’s toilet.
This exhibition on late 16th- and early 17th-century Dutch and Spanish painting is the result of an extensive and important research project on the part of the Museum arising from a collaborative agreement with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which will be lending a significant group of works. The exhibition will offer a reflection on the pictorial traditions represented by Spain and the Low Countries. While Dutch art-historical literature has considered these traditions as essentially different, this exhibition will aim to juxtapose the historical myths and artistic realities of the two countries and to reflect on the numerous traits that they share. In order to appreciate these parallels the exhibition will include major works by artists such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Ribera, Frans Hals and Vermeer.
Prado 200 is a new feature within the museum’s permanent display. This installation is presented as nine chronological sections which will present the museum’s history with an emphasis on its architecture, public image and its principal exhibitions and activities. Curated by Victor Cageao, it will include works of art and documentary material from the permanent collection and from the holdings of the Museum’s archive and library (paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, documents, architectural models, plans, etc.), displayed in Rooms 100, 101 and 102 of the Villanueva Building. It will be accompanied by a specially designed online timeline providing access to graphic and technical documentation on the Museum’s history.
The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (born 1968) has been selected to create the 2018 Hyundai commission for Tate Modern’s central four-stories high Turbine Hall. She is best known for her socially and politically engaged installations, which have in the past addressed topics of migration, border control and institutional power structures. She has created a unique concept for her political approach to art – Arte Util (useful art) – which is developed in her new work for the Turbine Hall. In 2012 Bruguera was also in residence at Tate Modern with her ongoing project Immigrant Movement International, in which visitors were required to line up and pass a lie detector test based on questions from the UK immigration form before being granted access to the Tate Tanks display. The installation is curated by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) and Isabella Maidment, Assistant Curator of Performance, and accompanied by a new book from Tate Publishing (forthcoming March 2019).
This is the first exhibition in the UK dedicated to the Spanish Baroque painter, draughtsman and printmaker Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652). Born in Játiva, Valencia, Ribera emigrated to Italy as a young artist. Proud of his Spanish heritage, he eventually settled in Naples, then a Spanish territory, but never again returned to Spain. A hybrid figure, Ribera had a significant influence on the art of both countries in the seventeenth century.
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