Spain’s Master Painter Sorolla
Joaquin Sorolla is one of my favorite painters. He was born in Seville, but his work displays the depth of the Italians and mastery of color of the French Impressionists. His work has the theatrical depth of a Artemisia Gentileschi, yet the joyfulness of a Raoul Dufy. He is a hot blooded Mediterranean man and takes joy as a serious subject. He ravenously paints with the emotional intensity of Van Gogh. But he has replaced the fear and self loathing with gratitude and play. Sorolla is madly in love with creation.
I had the good fortune recently to spend an afternoon with some of Sorolla’s most amazing work — an astonishing series of 14 murals that stretch across the entirety of a large oval room at the Hispanic Society in New York. The work is powerful. The painting draws you in. I looked across the room and felt the sun glistening on the giant tuna he portrayed.
As you approach, your eye lingers on the afternoon light that caresses the thick cotton draped across a fisherman’s beautifully formed tricep. How does he do it? As the distance between you and his strokes closes, the painting becomes an abstract frenzy of confused colors. But the strength of his conviction is enjoyed in the confident colors and brushwork.
The museum was conceived by Archer M. Huntington, the heir to a railroad fortune. He assembled a fantastic collection that includes paintings by El Greco, Franscisco Goya and Diego Velasquez, among others. He and his wife had discovered Sorrola on their trips to Spain and the love fest lasted the rest of their lives.
The museum hosted an exhibit by Sorolla in 1909, his first in the U.S., that drew 150,000 visitors and prompted Huntington to commission the murals that are now the museum’s centerpiece. The murals took the Spanish painter almost a decade.
Today it is the murals by Sorolla that astonish. And the experience is all the more extraordinary because of the setting. To say that the museum, located at 155th and Broadway, is off the beaten track is an understatement. The day I went it was cold and empty. There were perhaps a dozen people in the entire building and the room with the Sorolla murals was empty.
But the place has enormous charm. A guard greeted me and a close friend at the door in Spanish, gesturing toward a wooden donation box and a closet where we could hang our own coats. It’s a long way from the MOMA or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We did receive a sticker.
The main room of the museum which hosts Goya’s Portrait of the Duchess of Alba was built in the style of a Spanish courtyard. The museum also has a huge library that includes first editions of Don Quixote.
I spent a long time gazing at the Sorolla murals. They had special significance for me because I spent the previous five years living in Spain. Sorolla’s studio and birthplace were an hour north up the coast in Valencia. Each village in that area has a unique look and feel.
Altea is a pristine white with unmanageably bright light. The whiteness of the sand and the building make the sunlight particularly bright. Sorolla perfectly conveys this. I lived in Alicante. I was always trying to post pictures of the endless street festivals and parades of my neighbors. They would dress up in their traditional ensembles recreating the celebrations honoring God, wine, and bread in the same way their ancestors had for centuries. Sorolla paints the particular light of each village and gives you an actual experience of Spain. Again. It’s magic.
Huntington gave Sorrolla a location to share his extraordinary talent with a larger audience. But what I find so extraordinary about Huntington is that he asked Sorrola to go as big as he dared. Sorrolla loved Spain. These murals show him relishing his beloved country in sumptuous detail.
