UNTIL SUNDAY 13/10
Mubav. Saint Pius V, 9
Antonio Muñoz Degraín was "that landscape painter who painted in the time of Joaquín Sorolla" who must be vindicated because, like every Valencian painter of the middle centuries, has been hopelessly engulfed by the noise monster. This was a giant of painting, Without any doubt, but its branches are so leafy that it doesn't allow you to see other stars, and it's a pity. With the excuse of the centenary of Degrain's death, the Fine Arts Museum of Valencia shows off the figure of a painter twenty years older than Sorolla who has never been understood; it was a kind of post-romantic at a time when realism was a trend and did not suit the bourgeois taste of the time as did Pinazo or Sorolla himself. His constant experiments with light were not understood, the color and the matter, that he used the color mauve in symbolic landscapes that did not correspond to reality or his patches of impasto white pigment to represent the accumulation of snow in the horizons of the Sierra Nevada mountains. These are some of the elements that explain why Degrain does not have a train station named after him in Valencia, just a tiny street in the neighborhood of La Xerea that no one knows. These are the words of the director of the Museum of Fine Arts and co-curator of the exhibition, Pablo González Tornel, convinced that the illustrious characters who name the streets of a city say a lot about it. The fact is that, it seems, Degraín deserves at least one avenue, for his literary paintings, its orientalism and its fantastic landscapes, spiritual and chromatically innovative.
At that time, painters began to have at their disposal a wide range of synthetic color tubes that allowed them to explore new chromatic worlds. Degrain, Besides, he played with perspective by placing the viewer in the lower part of the landscape so that he would have to look up and feel small before the exuberance of nature and the grandiloquence and drama of the scene. Large-format paintings are displayed in the MuBAV on purple, diagonal walls, under large-scale projections that make zoom on the gesture of the brush and the details of the composition, and with Wagner music playing in the background while contemplating the painting The Walkyrias, where the tiny characters move over a fantastic and unreal landscape with a great gorge through which the river Rhine flows. It looks like the picture Echoes of Roncesvalles where the artist renounces the narrativity of the picture - of historical origin and therefore academic, if we are guided by the title— because his interest was not to tell the retreat of Charlemagne's army from Saragossa to French lands, but the echoes of that battle on a landscape with its own personality. The historical theme is an excuse to represent the landscape, that's why, the figurative is relegated to mere anecdote. The importance of the landscapes of Antonio Muñoz Degraín within Spanish pictorial modernity is what the MuBAV proposes in this anthological review that claims space for other painters within the Olympus of Valencian painters of the middle ages. S.M.
