Vision of Spain on Limited Run at the National Arts Club, features Joaquin Sorolla works

It’s rare to have the opportunity to take a trip through time and space while seeing the backstory of how an artist conceives his work, but “A Masterpiece in the Making: Joaquín Sorolla’s Gouaches for ‘Vision of Spain’” does all three. It’s the rough draft of an immersive, time travelling travelogue showing a society and a culture, created even as it was vanishing.

Joaaquin Sorolla was the John Singer Sargeant of Spain and the most famous and world reknowned Spanish Impressionist of his time. In 1911, he was commissioned by Archer M. Huntington, adopted son of a railroad magnate and founder of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (HSM&L) to create a huge 14 panel series of life in Spain’s regions to adorn the HSM&L. (The finished murals now hang in the Sorolla Room of the Hispanic Society building in Manhattan and can be seen when the HSM&L reopens April 26.)

To mark the centennial of his death, the HSM&L teamed with the National Arts Club to present, for the first time, a selection of Sorolla’s studies for his landmark work.

The backstory

Sorolla spent 1912-13 travelling Spain with a photographer, his equipment, and roll upon roll of huge sheets of brown craft paper, creating some 58 large-scale preparatory gouache (a type of watercolor) studies of scenes and dozens of smaller landscape and character studies. (He completed the series in 1919.)

This show of some 30 panels and dozens of character studies were selected from among the HSM&L’s huge collection of Sorolla’s work by Dr. Marcus B. Burke, Senior Curator, emeritus, at the HSM&L, and a leading scholar of the works of Joaquín Sorolla. The exhibit is an immersive experience with brown paper panels lining the walls with explosions of movement, color and drama–market days, religious processions, a local dance, a town square, bursting with roughed out characters and sun-baked scenes. But although his subject matter is old school, Sorolla’s creative process was surprisingly modern.

The process Dr. Burke explains that Sorolla took detailed photos of people and subjects in each region he portrayed, hired locals to pose in their native dress, and photographed them as well as painted them. ‘It was like he was casting a movie,” Dr. Burke explains. Sorolla painted the scenes and people outdoors. He then would review his works, and cut out certain individuals or scenes who particularly resonated, and place them, experimentally, in different scenes–an early example of Photoshop. (Some of these cut outs can be seen in a nearby gallery, and a close look at the works show a team of oxen or a housewife making repeat appearances.)

Furthermore, once Sorolla decided on an arrangement, he pasted different people and scenes together on a sheet, and painted over or around it, making the work a textured collage; a close view shows the wrinkles in the paper he pasted, and seams where he matched sheets. (A Japanese restoration process used mulberry fabric backing to preserve the sheets.) He wrote notes on the sheets, and left the drips at the bottom from his watercolors. The collage, the texture, the writing and spontaneity is not all that different from fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso, unknown at the time.

The vision

The regions range from the North of Spain, the Basque region, Seville, Castile, Navarre, Asturias and Aragon. All the panels and studies are in their own way, genre paintings – a church service, a local dance, market day in a busy square, and panoramas of peasants and farmers, priests and passersby, set against mountains and valleys, rustic farmlands and church squares.

“It was his vision of Spain, but not romanticized,” says Dr. Burke. “It was a kind of Spain that both Sorolla and Huntington knew was disappearing.” Ironically, Burke points out, that rural way of life was vanishing because of the advance of the railroads in Spain – the industry that created Huntington’s fortune.

That explains Sorolla’s passion for verisimilitude in this series. Backed by funds from his rich patron, he traveled extensively in each site, hired locals, posed them in various locations, photographed and painted them in their native attire – or supplied it. He even relied on local pigments for his studies to capture the essence of each area.

Genre Paintings

All the studies, large and small, capture the typical essentials of daily life in rural Spain: merchants, horses, ox-carts, market women, carriages, wagons laden with goods, the blues of the sea, sun dappled mountains and dusty vistas, brilliant white light and blue skies, young bravos driving ox-teams or mules, young girls carrying water, priests, monks, and over all, a village church.

Sorolla used and reused certain favorite figures; a woman with a basket on her head reappears in different landscapes, an early use of Photoshop. An adjacent room is a collection of favorite figures of people and animals he used and reused. Visitors will recognize some of these figures in the scenes for Castile.

His style offers the dash and verve of impressionism and an eye for detail, ranging from the merest suggestion of a Dominican monk in a white habit to painstakingly placing the dots on the fabric of a peasant woman’s kerchief. You can see the cutouts in the crackle of the paper. He uses pops of bright colors –the reds of a shawl, vibrant greens, and yellows against a dusty brown background.

He did these studies on huge rolls of brown craft paper, and the color of the paper is an additional art touch. The rich browns, and ochres are part of the landscape and help suggest the dusty brown roads the weary oxen and their drivers traversed every day, in scene after scene. What’s interesting about these works is that some are suggestions of forms and then you’ll come upon a fully realized figure with an interior life, executed in a few strokes–saucy wenches, solemn monks, imperious matadors.

Slice of life

For example, the study for the Basque Provinces, Navarre and Aragon is a slice of life. A trio of Dominican monks, just emerging from the church behind them, anchor the scene on the left. In the foreground, a pair of sturdy oxen pulling a wagon are guided by a young bravo in a black beret set the stage. Housewives carry their provisions on their heads, or guide a weary pony heavy with burdens. A woman on horseback, seen from behind, is going back home. Farmers sort their wares in the background. In the middle, overseeing all and bisecting the scene in the square, is a tall monument to the local patron saint.

If you can’t afford a trip to Spain, take a trip to the National Arts Club and see the backstory of a landmark work by a renowned Spanish artist....then take a trip to the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in Washington Heights to see the completed work. You won’t be disappointed.