2023-08-09 22:03:51
“What I would like is not to get so excited, because after a few hours like today I feel undone, exhausted, I can’t take so much pleasure, I can’t resist it like before.” Joaquín Sorolla is 52 years old and notices that something has changed in his body. He is painting in Lloret de Mar, a beautiful corner of Catalonia. He finishes one of the 14 panels that will decorate the library of the Hispanic Society of New York, commissioned by the billionaire Archer Milton Huntington. Despite the delicious Mediterranean environment, the care of friends or the squad of assistants who accompany him, alarm bells go off in the painter’s health. “I have had severe pain in the neck and it makes me sad for fear, it is not something important. I don’t eat meat, I don’t drink wine and I’m going to give up tobacco… since the other has been given up by force”, he writes to Clotilde García del Castillo, his wife.
Culture has not bought Sorolla’s work from the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia for almost 40 years
Further
He also notifies the client that he is going to pay him $150,000 to search for and portray the Spanish soul. He tells her that the “difficult picture of Catalonia” is finished. She has dedicated it to fishing and trading it. In this there is no party or celebration like in others, but work in the middle of nature. It is a spectacular pine forest with the blue of the sea in the background. The Sorolla Museum preserves the complete process of the sketches since this cove in Santa Cristina was located. “It is a wonder. Large pine trees on the mountain, with clear colored rocks, on a marvelous sea of blue and green. Something Greek and stupendous ”, he writes in a letter to the family months before finishing the monumental canvas of almost five meters wide and a height of three and a half meters.
His health is “somewhat broken,” he admits to Huntington. “What annoys me the most is the tremor I have when I finish working. If I do it at ease, like today, it takes me a long hour to calm down, old age! ”, She says. Despite the severe regimen that the doctors have recommended, the tremors do not stop.
an exhausting obsession
When he arrived in Catalonia in 1915 to paint its people, their clothes, their attitudes and their landscapes, he had exceeded half of the commission and he resented the effort of crossing the Iberian Peninsula by donkey, train, cart, automobile, on foot, with the cold and the heat in tow. And the worst, his obsessive dedication to painting. “What I am is tired, it is very natural, anxiety is what consumes me the most in life; I lack the phlegm of Velázquez ”, he wrote to Clotilde.
At that time, I was afraid that after that trip there would be no more, as it happened. “Painting yes, but where it’s not this cold, and if it can’t be finished within five years, let it be ten, because exposing yourself to leaving life at any moment is useless,” he points out again in another letter. He is well aware of what he is getting himself into. Insomnia doesn’t let him rest either.
It all began in 1910, when he spoke with Huntington about the commission in Paris, which they signed a year later and in 1913 he began to paint. The first frieze was the spectacular Castilla, festival of bread. In 1914 the first in Seville, Aragon, Navarra and Guipúzcoa. Then, in 1915, two more about Seville, the one dedicated to Galicia and the one we have told about Catalonia. With this intense pace of work that his unique abilities allowed him, it didn’t take long for anxiety, palpitations, physical exhaustion, tremors, nosebleeds, kidney problems to appear… It wasn’t painting that was killing him, but his obsession for painting.
a country in extinction
The work, which lasted seven years, required him to locate the environment, but also the types he would portray. She asked the models to dress up in traditional and rich costumes. He built a Spain based on hundreds of scraps, of extracts that made up an emblematic image of that Spain that he was looking for. An unreal. Sorolla exaggerated an unreal Spain. Reality was too real and boring, much less exotic. She had nothing to do with Huntington’s vision. The artist invented a Spain for Archer Milton and built monumental scenes of stereotypes, very close to postcards and souvenirs. The frieze of the Hispanic Society became the first major Spanish tourism campaign. In 1911 the Royal Tourism Commission had already been created in Spain and in 1903 there was already talk of “the industry of foreigners”.
But it was also the series of nobodies. The portraitist of the exemplary citizens attended to the currents. Originally, the commission was a gallery of illustrious Spaniards. Sorolla did not want a historical series, because he was not used to doing research. Because the past was not his field of action. He, too, did not want to “maintain or polish” the historical events. He did not want to reinvent the Spanish past, nor the discovery of America, nor the War of Independence, etc. And in the end, he makes a series that is history but without History, with capital letters.
His was the present, the gestures, the clothes, the customs. Although he did not look at them like Ignacio Zuloaga. They were two painters in search of the “Spanish soul”: Sorolla was accused of being superficial, of not reaching the depths of the other, of staying in the festivities of light and impossible colors. Critics accused him of being so brilliant that under his painting “we don’t feel life pulsating.” If Sorolla is the postcard, Zuloaga is the X-ray. Both went looking for the Spain that was not in the news, that remained far from modernity, cities and industrialization. They painted Spain in danger of extinction.
Franco’s reinterpretation
The specialists María Luisa Menéndez Robles and David Ruiz López investigated the process of creating these canvases for the Hispanic Society in 2009, with a large exhibition at the Sorolla Museum. They pointed out that the painter soaked up Giner de los Ríos and his projects to modernize the country. Giner de los Ríos liked Sorolla because his art reconciled the Europeanist desire and the claim of what is Spanish and regional. The artist also related to Galdós and Manuel Bartolomé Gossío, among others. His intellectual references were the ones who awakened regenerationist ideals in him, who sought to modernize the country through education and the creation of new sources of wealth.
This recovery of the Spanish identity was later taken advantage of by the Franco regime, which reconstructed Sorolla’s imaginary. And he put it at the propaganda service of the dictatorship, as Isabel Tejada has explained. For the dictatorship, Sorolla represented “a fervent Hispanic passion.” “Sorolla having become the” Spanish “leader” of impressionism “at his high tide, he claimed another origin for the Valencian painter, in this case Hispanic”, Tejada has written.
Joaquín Sorolla rested in 1916 from his trips in search of the vision of Spain that were ending his life. The following year, he finished the panels on Extremadura, Elche and the last one, the spectacular one on tuna fishing, in Ayamonte. He had invested seven years and not five as he had anticipated. A few months after turning in the completed commission, while painting the portrait of Mabel Rick, in June 1920, he suffered a stroke. He had planned to go to New York in October for the placement of the monumental series in the library of the Hispanic Society. But he was disabled for any activity. He died on August 10, 1923, at his home in Cercedilla, at the age of 60.
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