The portrait is more than just capturing a face. It is about capturing a life and, in that attempt to go beyond the mere representation of someone tastefully composed and skilfully executed, the painter and his model establish a bond that goes beyond that suspended time. The two will be united forever by the portrait. Although, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, interest in the identity of the sitter will extinguish after two or three generations and what will end up interesting us is the identity of the person portrayed. Miguel Falomir, the director of the Prado Museum, remembers him before the fabulous collection of portraits that have traveled from the Madrid art gallery to Barcelona and that, in the CaixaForum rooms, make up a fresco of how the artists saw, or how they wanted to be seen , Spanish society of the 19th century. Or part of it.
XIX. The century of the portrait. From illustration to modernity, open until June 4, is a new chapter in the complicity relationship that the Prado Museum and La Caixa Foundation have maintained since 2011 and thanks to which their collections have been able to travel to different Spanish cities . In this case, moreover, it is the museum itself that seems to have moved with the works, inserting itself in a CaixaForum transformed into a succession of galleries that are accessed through a corridor full of sculptures.
“Portrait is the genre in which a closer relationship is established between artist and client, a close but also conflictive relationship because everyone is clear about how they want to see themselves portrayed. And that requires a space for negotiation. That the artist, despite having his hands tied, is able to capture his own stamp is one of the most intriguing and exciting things in art ”, considers Falomir.
On the tour designed by curator Javier Barón, the visitor will come across stellar names such as Goya (including his moving 1918 self-portrait, in which he shows himself to be a vulnerable and fragile person), Madrazo (loving his wife María Hahn) , Rosales (the future Countess of Santovenia), Villanueva (country Indians and tunos from the Philippines), Fortuny, Sorolla (Maria Figueroa dressed as a menina), Zuloaga (Victoria Malinowska), Nonell (the gypsies...).
A parade of great men and women -we are in the century of individualism, and the access to the portrait that supposed the irruption of photography was contested by the wealthiest with pictorial portraits as a way of distinction-, but also children who, in the light Rousseau, they are kind and spontaneous. Barón explains that it is also the moment in which the gaze awakens a genuine interest in the other, gypsy women, characters from the colonies, such as the Philippines, or from exotic geographies such as Morocco. “They are not just representations of popular types, but true portraits”, explains the curator.
The results are not always flattering, nor are they intended to be. In La señora de Delicado de Imaz, Vicente López paints an impertinent portrait of the young woman, whose upper lip appears covered with thick black hair, her gaze half pleading and insecure, trying to hide her lack of beauty with the undisguised ostentation of her best finery. For centuries, the face was the least important part of the portrait. What mattered was giving an impression of status: it was the clothes, the jewelry, that spoke loudest. Because the portrait, almost always the result of a commission, can also be an exhibition of egos rather than the genuine encounter between two people. And not just from customers. Some painters, as the historian Simon Abrahams noted, tend to make their subjects resemble themselves. Others allow the sitter to take over the painting and breathe.
At CaixaForum you will find examples of both, and among the works on display (paintings, photographs, drawings, coins, sculptures...), of which 70 had never left the Prado, you will come across fascinating characters such as the writer Elinor Glyn , known for popularizing the concept of It-girl , whose image is captured here by the Hungarian Philip Alexius Laszlo from Lombos. But the desire for immortality, also in painting, goes beyond life itself. In the last chapter we see how the artists also strove to perpetuate the factions of those who are no longer alive, such as José Nin i Tudó's portrait of Bishop Narciso Martínez Izquierdo who was assassinated by a disturbed priest on Palm Sunday.
