UNTIL SUNDAY 31/5
Mubav. Saint Pius V, 9
Raphael on the poster for the indie festival Sonorama or Juan Muñoz exhibiting at the Prado Museum; that is modern times, an unexpected proposal: an exhibition of modern art in a museum that houses works with more than five hundred years of history behind them. And why does the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia keep in its warehouses pieces that do not correspond to its historical pedigree?? Because in 1968, when reference contemporary art museums such as the Reina Sofía or the IVAM did not yet exist, Felipe Garín —director of the Prado, of the Spanish Academy in Rome and the Museum Consortium (in this order)—, convinced the Ministry of Culture to buy works by prominent Valencian artists and groups such as Eusebio Sempere or the Chronicle Team, who developed their careers after that invisible barrier raised by the Spanish Civil War. At that time they had no better accommodation than the Museum of Fine Arts, whose collection has been completed with donations from Aurora Valero, Genaro Lahuerta o Francisco Sebastian, and with specific purchases that have covered obvious gaps for the expert eye. Paintings have been purchased Juana French, whose Still life with bottles, purely expressionist, brings together its experimental essence; or of Dario Villalba, who in the seventies was a pioneer in the use of photographic printing intervened with oil paint. as a sample, crazy head, and collage related to the baroque pictorial tradition that highlights the pathos of a suffering face.
Modern times plays with that old dichotomy of art history that was accentuated after the appearance of photography: Do we bet on the representative value or on the plastic? Either we strive to imitate reality or we give free rein to form., the stroke, gesture and color without seeking fidelity. We will have to accept that the representation of a pipe is not really a pipe, that every pictorial representation (even photographic) is separated from reality.
The recovery of the arts after the Civil War was slow in an isolated Spain that was trying to survive in Europe devastated by the Second World War.. Artists like Manolo Gil They returned to figurative painting with an aura of evident pessimism. Others like Aurora Valero, in his magnificent self-portrait with expressionist and fauvist nods, they kept modernity alive. They are both part of the first part of the tour, dedicated to postwar figuration, where Valencian pop art collectives appear such as Reality Team o Juan Genovés.
At the opposite pole, abstraction was actively promoted by the Franco regime as a symbol of an alleged Iberian modernity, among other things, because the censors failed to see the underlying political message. Message that was explicit in Genovés' pieces, For example. The abstraction in this exhibition is represented by the material expressionism of Jacinta Roncalés, in which the volumes stand out without shame; the constructivist-oriented abstraction of Joaquin Michavila; the geometric sculptures of chrome rods of Eusebio Sempere, who play with Op Art and kinetic art; and the synthesis of art, science and technology that boasts José María Yturralde —still active— in the crown jewel of the exhibition: impossible figure 3.
The exhibition closes with a section dedicated to still lifes and landscape, the most bourgeois of genres, who experienced a moralizing trend in the first decades of the 20th century. The landscapers of Aiora Pedro Camera captured desolation of the landscape, Francisco Sebastian he decomposed it with cubist influences, Genaro Lahuerta he rearranged it à la Cezanne and Juan Bautista Porcar he contrasted it with industrialization. The Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia dusts off its storage to show us, restored, works that were left aside after the creation of the IVAM and demonstrate that, during the central decades of the 20th century, Valencia was on the front line worldwide. S.M.
