ARTES

News from ARTES Scholars

ARTES warmly congratulates Ana Dias on a successful viva of her PhD thesis, ‘The Apocalypse in early medieval Iberia: the function and impact of the illuminated “Beatus”’. Ana’s research at Durham University was supported by ARTES through a PhD Scholarship (2015) and an ARTES Coll&Cortes Travel Scholarship (2017).

We are also pleased to announce the publication of Las portadas de la catedral de Jaca. Reforma eclesiástica y poder real a finales del siglo XI (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 2018), by Francisco de Asís García García. In 2017 Francisco was awarded an ARTES Coll y Cortés Post-doctoral Scholarship to support research on the V&A’s collections of medieval Iberian textiles as an Erasmus + Visiting Fellow.

ARTES accepts applications for a number of awards each year, including an essay prize and travel scholarships. We also collaborate with CEEH to support PhD scholarships at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Durham University. Click here for more information on our awards.

ARTES is a Registered Charity (no. 1112883) dedicated to raising awareness and understanding of Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture. You can support our work by becoming a member of our friendly, enthusiastic and international community.

CSA Curatorial Fellowship at the Meadows Museum, Dallas

The Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas, has announced that the Center for Spain in America (CSA) will support the museum’s pre-doctoral curatorial fellowship for 2019–2020. Established in 2011, the pre-doctoral fellowship provides an intensive scholarly, professional experience with the opportunity to research Spanish art at the Meadows and other national and international institutions.

CSA will also underwrite the catalog for the forthcoming exhibition Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain (National Gallery of Art, October 13, 2019–February 17, 2020; Meadows Museum, March 29–July 26, 2020). It will be the first general book on Berruguete published in English.

The New York-based CSA fosters the study of Spanish history, art and literature by creating and funding doctoral fellowships at European and American universities, as well as research centers with archival and bibliographical material relevant to the field of Hispanism. The Center and its Spanish counterpart, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), have collaborated with the Meadows Museum on several projects prior to this announcement, including the exhibition and catalog for The Lost Manuscripts from the Sistine Chapel: An Epic Journey from Rome to Toledo (2011); the exhibition and catalog for The Spanish Gesture: Drawings From Murillo to Goya in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2014); Sorolla in America: Friends and Patrons (2015), a study of the major collectors of Sorolla’s work; and the catalog for Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle.

Students wishing to apply for the CSA Curatorial Fellowship can find more information on the Meadows Museum’s website.

Closing Soon: Cristina Iglesias: entrǝspacios/interspaces, Fundación Botín, Santander, closes 3 March 2019

Foto5galeriaciglesias — Corredor Suspendido I, 2006 925 x 795 cm Hierro dulce trenzado, cables de acero y sombra. Vista de instalación Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013 Foto: Attilio Maranzano

A recipient of Spain’s National Visual Arts Award in 1999, Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastián, 1956) is an internationally renowned Spanish artist. This exhibition consists of a huge collection of pieces that will be on display on the second floor of the west wing of the Centro Botín. Well-known for her sculptural pieces with hanging pavilions, latticework, corridors and labyrinths, Iglesias combines industrial materials and natural elements to create unusual, experiential spaces.

Cristina Iglesias has developed a close relationship with the Fundación Botín and its recently opened arts centre in Santander. This relationship translated into a site-specific sculptural intervention at the Centro Botín and the Pereda Gardens, titled Desde lo subterráneo (From the Underground), which features four pools and a pond in stone, iron and water. Moreover, in September 2018, Iglesias led a Villa Iris Visual Arts Workshop, an annual project sponsored by the Botín Foundation since 1994. The latest grand exhibition by Cristina Iglesias in Spain was on at the Reina Sofía Museum and Arts Centre in 2013. Her upcoming exhibition at the Centro Botín will offer a great chance to enjoy both her older and more recent pieces.

Click here for more information.

Opens Today: Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, until 12 May 2019

frida_kahlo_appearances_can_be_deceiving_2010.80_nickolas_muray_frida_in_new_york_large_jpeg_2004w_600_814 — Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892–1965). Frida in New York, 1946; printed 2006. Carbon pigment print, image: 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2010.80. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s unique and immediately recognizable style was an integral part of her identity. Kahlo came to define herself through her ethnicity, disability, and politics, all of which were at the heart of her work. Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is the largest U.S. exhibition in ten years devoted to the iconic painter and the first in the United States to display a collection of her clothing and other personal possessions, which were rediscovered and inventoried in 2004 after being locked away since Kahlo’s death, in 1954. They are displayed alongside important paintings, drawings, and photographs from the celebrated Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art, as well as related historical film and ephemera. To highlight the collecting interests of Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, works from the museum’s extensive holdings of Mesoamerican art are also included.

Kahlo’s personal artifacts—which range from noteworthy examples of Kahlo’s Tehuana clothing, contemporary and pre-Colonial jewelry, and some of the many hand-painted corsets and prosthetics used by the artist during her lifetime—had been stored in the Casa Azul (Blue House), the longtime Mexico City home of Kahlo and Rivera, who had stipulated that their possessions not be disclosed until 15 years after Rivera’s death. The objects shed new light on how Kahlo crafted her appearance and shaped her personal and public identity to reflect her cultural heritage and political beliefs, while also addressing and incorporating her physical disabilities.

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is based on an exhibition at the V&A London curated by Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa, with Gannit Ankori as curatorial advisor. Their continued participation has been essential to presenting the Brooklyn exhibition, which is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, Brooklyn Museum, in collaboration with the Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, and The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation.

Click here for more information

Opens Today: The Young Picasso, Blue and Rose Periods, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, until 26 May 2019

csm_PARIS_Famille-saltimbanque-avec-singe_LAC_425x300mm_6f027eca53 — PABLO PICASSO, FAMILLE DE SALTIMBANQUES AVEC UN SINGE, 1905
Gouache, watercolour and ink on cardboard, 104 x 75 cm
Göteborg Konstmuseum, Purchase 1922
© Succession Picasso / 2018, ProLitteris, Zurich
Photo: © Göteborg Konstmuseum

In 2019, as an exceptional cultural highlight, the Fondation Beyeler is mounting a unique exhibition devoted to Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces of his early Blue and Rose periods. This will be the most comprehensive presentation ever seen in Europe of Picasso’s paintings and sculptures from 1901 to 1906, each one of which is a milestone on the road to recognition as the twentieth century’s paramount artist. Picasso’s pictures from this period are counted among the most beautiful examples of modern art and are certainly some of the most valuable art works anywhere in the world.

At the age of just twenty, the aspiring genius Picasso (1881 – 1973) was already engaged in a restless search for new themes and forms of expression, which he immediately brought to perfection. One artistic revolution followed another, in a rapid succession of changing styles and visual worlds. The forthcoming exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler places the focus on the Blue and Rose periods, and thus on a central phase in Picasso’s work. It also sheds fresh light on the emergence, from 1907 onward, of Cubism, as an epochal new movement that was nevertheless rooted in the art of the preceding period.

In these poignant and magical works, realized in Spain and France, Picasso – the artist of the century – creates images that have a universal evocative power. Matters of existential significance, such as life, love, sexuality, fate, and death, find their embodiment in the delicate beauty of young women and men, but also in depictions of children and old people who carry within them happiness and joy, accompanied by sadness.

The exhibition features around 75 masterpieces on loan from major museums and private collections worldwide. In a multimedia space, fascinating and interactive books and a film allow visitors to immerse themselves in the young artist’s life and work.

Click here for more information.

Opens Today: Fortuny: Friends and Followers, Meadows Museum, Dallas, until June 2, 2019

Mariano-Fortuny-The-Choice-of-a-Model — Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (Spanish, 1838–1874), *The Choice of a Model,* 1868–74. Oil on wood. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection), 2015.143.12.

A painting by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838–1874), The Choice of a Model (1868–74), is on long-term loan from the National Gallery of Art, DC, to the Meadows Museum. In honor of this prestigious loan, the Museum will host an exhibition dedicated to Fortuny and his world, drawing from its rich holdings of works on paper as well as key loans from private and public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in order to showcase many of the friends, family, and followers who engaged with the popular Spanish painter’s work. Fortuny’s paintings were especially prized by nineteenth-century American collectors as well as by contemporaneous artists. The legacy of that popularity resonates with the distinctly American provenance of both the Meadows’s Beach at Portici and the National Gallery’s The Choice of a Model, and their current ownership by American museums.

Though today Fortuny is lesser known outside the country of his birth, the Spanish painter was extremely popular in both Europe and the United States during his lifetime and well into the early twentieth century. Imitators of his characteristically proto-Impressionist, painterly style and eclectic, “exotic” genre scenes were so plentiful that their style came to be described with its very own “ism”: “Fortunismo” (Fortuny-ism). Fortuny: Friends and Followers explores that legacy by bringing together a diverse group of artists, including the important French artists Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), James Tissot (1836–1902), Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815– 1891). Fortuny’s sphere of influence is explored through a variety of themes including intimate representations of family and home, trends of modern life in European cosmopolitan centers like Paris and Venice, cultural arts from Spain and beyond, and much more.

Click here for more information.

Opens Today: Raúl de Nieves: Fina, Cleveland Museum of Art @ Transformer Station, Cleveland, until 28 April 2018

stacks-image-f3e15d7 Raúl de Nieves: Fina, the first solo museum exhibition by Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Michoacán, Mexico), will feature new work in a site-specific installation developed for the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Transformer Station. Narrative facets of the installation will be informed by de Nieves’s experience of Mexican cultural traditions, considered through the lens of this moment in history. These will unfold in relation to the particular architecture of the Transformer Station. As a whole, the installation will be characterized by the artist’s ongoing interest in transforming humble materials into spectacular objects that alter the spaces around them.

De Nieves, who lives in New York, traces his artistic practice back to his childhood in Mexico: at school and alongside family members, he learned traditional Latin American sewing and beadwork that now permeate his art in multiple ways. At the age of nine de Nieves migrated to San Diego with his mother and two brothers. Later he moved to San Francisco and finally to New York, where his multimedia practice, including painting, sculpture, and performance, has taken shape. De Nieves has presented solo projects and performances at The Kitchen and the Watermill Center, New York (both 2017), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016). He has participated in major contemporary art surveys, including Documenta 14 (2018), the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and Greater New York at MoMA/PS1 (2015). His work is part of the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art’s inaugural exhibition in its new building that opened in New York in summer 2018.

Click here for more information

ARTES Glendinning Lecture: Javier Barón, ‘Two Masters of the Prado: Velázquez, El Greco and Modern Painting’, Instituto Cervantes, London, 27 February 2019

Screenshot 2019-02-01 at 13.31.04 This year’s Glendinning Lecture, an annual event in honour of the great Hispanist Nigel Glendinning, will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Museo Nacional del Prado.

Dr Javier Barón will deliver a lecture on how Velázquez and El Greco influenced modern painting.

From its opening in 1819, the Prado offered artists a unique opportunity to study the oeuvre of Spanish Old Masters, especially Murillo, Velázquez and El Greco. This was, precisely, the chronological order in which these masters influenced foreign painters.

During the nineteenth century, Velázquez was the most appreciated Spanish master. The Prado owned the most extensive collection of this artist in the world. So, many painters, amongst them Wilkie, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Sargent, Chase and others came to Madrid to see his masterworks. Velázquez’s approach to everyday life, as well as his large and loose brushstrokes, were relevant to naturalistic painters.

El Greco was especially appreciated after the first monographic exhibition of his work took place at the Prado in 1902. His influence was already important in the mainstream renewal of painting spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and cubism in Paris. At the same time, El Greco was the major reference for Central European Expressionism. American artists also appreciated the suggestiveness of his painting when seeking to lay the foundation of their own modernity.

Javier Barón is Doctor in History of Art by the University of Oviedo, where he was graduated with honours back in 1989. Before joining Prado Museum, he was a professor of Art History at the University of Oviedo (1991–2002). In 2003, Barón was appointed as Head of Nineteenth-century Painting Department at the Prado Museum, a position he held until 2014, when he became Senior Curator. He is correspondent member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History, the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Telmo, in Málaga, as well as member of the Royal Institute of Asturian Studies, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, member of the Board of Trustees of the Sorolla Museum and Member of the Madrid City Council Board of Valuation of Works of Art.

Free and open to all, but please book a ticket here.

Lecture: Dr Edward Payne, ‘Le noir Valencian’: Ribera, Gautier and the French Taste for Violent Painting, Durham University, 7 February 2019

7th February 2019, 16:00 to 17:00, Room 146, Elvet Riverside 1, Durham University

Paintings 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.

Click here for more information, or contact zurbaran.centre@durham.ac.uk

Featured Exhibition: Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, MFA Boston, until 12 May 2019

The photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s—a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.

This is the first major East Coast presentation of Iturbide’s work, featuring approximately 125 photographs that span her five-decade-long career. Organised into nine sections, the exhibition opens with early photographs, followed by three series focused on three of Mexico’s many indigenous cultures: Juchitán captures the essential role of women in Zapotec culture; Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) concentrates on the Seri people living in the Sonoran Desert; and La Mixteca documents elaborate goat-slaughtering rituals in Oaxaca, serving as critical commentary on the exploitation of workers. Thematic groupings highlight Iturbide’s explorations of various aspects of Mexican culture, including fiestas, death and mortality, and birds and their symbolism. Her more recent work is presented in two series related to Mexico’s cultural and artistic heritage, featuring plants—mainly cacti—in “intensive care” at the Oaxaca Ethnobotanical Gardens, as well as El baño de Frida (Frida’s Bathroom), a selection of photographs in Gallery 335 depicting personal belongings in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul that had been locked away for 50 years after the artist’s death.

Iturbide’s powerful and provocative photographs are anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric. Her work embodies her empathetic approach to photography and her deep connection with her subjects, asking questions through its capacity for imaginary associations. Drawn primarily from Iturbide’s own collection, Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico also includes the Museum’s recent acquisition of 37 works by the artist, as well as loans from museums and private collections throughout the US and Mexico. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications.

Click here for more information on the exhibition, and here for the accompanying publication