BANCAJA FOUNDATION. Pl. Tetouan, 23
Ignacio Zuloaga is not a painter cool, nor is he particularly likeable. In the artistic, prima facie, we find Castilian peasants, bulls and majas with mantilla perpetuating the image of a folkloric Spain backward with respect to Europe, And personally, it generates rejection to know his sincere support for Franco's regime.. But it had many other faces that are also shown in this to the hole. Character and emotion, the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the Basque artist in Valencia, one of the key painters of the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. In its beginnings, He became friends with some of the makers of the pictorial revolution (the first isms) that was taking place in Paris, artists like Degas, Gauguin y Toulouse-Lautrec. From there come his canvases of synthetic inspiration and decorative imprint.. But on the other hand he continued to nourish his admiration for the great masters of Spanish painting., the Velázquez, Goya, Zurbaran, Ribera and El Greco. There is no doubt that He was a master of portraiture, with theatrical lighting, captured the psychology of powerful women dressed in dark in front of a cloudy Castilian landscape, of bourgeois, aristocrats, intellectuals, friends (whom he framed in a landscape that was related to his life and work) and family, that closes the tour with The painter's family (1937), one of the best multiple portraits of the Spanish tradition clearly inspired by Las Meninas by Velázquez. S.M.
