For many, no one has captured the essence and brilliance of the Mediterranean Sea like him. Joaquín Sorolla, whose popularity spread throughout Europe and the United States, is one of the capital figures of Spanish painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Light, with its particular play of brightness and shadows, is a common element in the extensive and admired work of the Valencian painter, along with his favorite subject: beach scenes. The exhibition Sorolla's summers, which can be seen until next January 7 in the Recoletos Room of Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, brings the public closer to the evolution of his unique view of the sea.
Through a careful selection of 40 works, 15 medium and large format, and another 25 small format, Fundación MAPFRE joins the tribute that this year is paid to the artist on the occasion of the centenary of his death in collaboration with the Museum Sorolla and the Sorolla Museum Foundation. The exhibition shows Sorolla's modernity when representing the work that was done at sea and the atmosphere typical of the summer vacation that was experienced on the Mediterranean and Cantabrian coasts.
Born in 1863, Sorolla belonged to a generation of painters who contemplated the sea with new eyes. The Valencian painter mastered light, which he combined with everyday scenes resulting from his observation. “I have witnessed the return of fishing: the beautiful candles, the groups of fishermen, the lights of a thousand colors reflecting in the blue of the sea... They gave me a time that is difficult to forget,” the artist wrote, excited, to his wife. , Clotilde García, in one of the numerous letters they shared.
Like the Impressionists, Sorolla liked to work outdoors and capture directly on his canvases everything that was developing around him. The depiction of light and color in his brilliant beach scenes became one of his greatest hallmarks. The artist did not mind working on the beach, carrying canvases and paints and establishing, for hours, a private workshop among umbrellas and awnings.
The modernity of his painting stands out for the thematic choice of the coast, the framing of the compositions and its link with the photographic language, the spontaneity of the capture of nature, the treatment of color and the effects of light for the creation of the volumes. In fact, his work has been identified with the recovery of the classical vision of the Mediterranean, including works by Bonnard, Signac, Matisse and Picasso.
As shown in The Summers of Sorolla, the artist focused his first scenes on the beach on work at sea, with fishing boats, sailors at work or women waiting for the catch on the shore under the intense sun. Among the first examples is a work with which the Valencian obtained his most important international success to date at the Paris Salon of 1895, The Return of Fishing, one of whose studies opens the Fundación MAPFRE exhibition.
Although his first scenes focus on the condition of the sea as a means of life and away from fear of the unknown, it is his representations of summer relaxation on the beach with which his work is most associated. These paintings demonstrate the evolution that the marine environment experienced in relation to the therapeutic properties of bathing and the birth of the summer vacation as a time of leisure and sociability. In fact, Sorolla became a chronicler of an entire era by reflecting first-hand the uses and customs of society between centuries.
With the arrival of summer the population could rest, but not Sorolla. The painter worked tirelessly during his summers on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Cantabrian Sea. Thus, he traveled with his family to the coast to represent matters of work and leisure at sea with which to consolidate his artistic career and prepare works for his future exhibitions. When the artist was at the peak of his career, these motifs became, for him, a refuge.
In his Mediterranean scenes, the painter conveys the enjoyment of the population, especially in his native Valencia, with naked boys, girls in light robes or swimmers in full contact with nature. Images that contrast with the distinguished atmosphere of Cantabrian towns such as Biarritz, Zarauz or San Sebastián, cities represented in a very different light and in compositions starring elegant female figures, generally his wife and daughters, who entertain themselves in spaces designed for relationships. social.
In Sorolla's summers, you can also see his notes or "color notes" - as he himself called them -, made on small wooden or cardboard supports and which accompanied Sorolla in his plastic research. To these works, which contain the essence of all his painting, will be added others typical of the last stage of his career, when, in the parentheses of the great effort that the ambitious Vision of Spain project for the Hispanic Society of America entailed, He found rest in the creation of beach scenes, such as Taking out the boat or Valencian fisherwoman with baskets made in the summer of 1916. The exhibition closes with Children looking for shellfish (1919), a work that collects all the achievements of his artistic modernity, made in Ibiza during his last summer before falling ill and having to abandon his brushes.
