The nude is part of the preparation of every artist. Along with still life, landscape or portrait, it is the oldest artistic genre and the one with the most interpretations and meanings. Obligatory in the academies of Fine Arts as an unsurpassable form of learning, over time the creators discovered that there is no better field of experimentation than the landscape offered by human flesh. At a time when unclothed characters are once again stirring up ultra-conservative sectors, the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga has dared to inaugurate a complete exhibition on the subject. Graduated Nudes. Normative and insurrectionary bodies in Spanish art (1870-1970)can be seen until March 9, 2025. 86 works (painting, sculpture, photography) on loan from fifty public and private collectors are on display. As in other temporary exhibitions at the museum, no works from Carmen Thyssen’s private collection are on display.
The first work that the visitor encounters is Dalí’s version of the Picasso paintings. The ladies of Avignon (1970), one of the six pieces loaned by the Reina Sofía. In front of the imposing oil painting, Lourdes Moreno, artistic director of the Carmen Thyssen Málaga museum, warns that the exhibition “is not a mere inventory of nudes, but rather analyzes, based on the common thread of the human body, the progressive aesthetic and conceptual metamorphosis that “It caused the implementation of modernity in Spanish art.” The exhibition has been presented as a heterogeneous story open to the viewer’s personal interpretation, with the intention of appealing to sensitive pleasure and making people reflect on the idea of beauty, the canon and the mutant nature of modern art, explains Moreno.
The time frame that the tour covers moves between 1870 and 1970, a century in which, together with the academies, all the formal and stylistic changes of modernity were developed. The artists are Spanish and almost all of them have made their work in Spain, even during the period of the dictatorship, “because most of the artists knew how to avoid the regime’s persecutions,” notes Lourdes Moreno.
Three large oil paintings by a very young Picasso from the Barcelona school (16 and 17 years old) show nude male models that were made as exercises for the academy. The artist ended up donating them to his museum in Barcelona. From Catalonia, female nudes by Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas are also exhibited.
Aurelia Navarro, painter and nun
More than a strict chronological order, the exhibition recreates stylistic environments of works that share the same concept of portraiture. This is what happens with the Venus of poetry (1913), a young woman painted by Julio Romero de Torres, whose face corresponds to the cupletist Raquel Meller; He hisses it (1913) by Anglada Camarasa or The young woman washing (1920) by Julio González. Along with all these masterpieces, the oil painting draws attention woman nude (1908) signed by Aurelia Navarro, an artist born into a wealthy and conservative family who was first allowed to learn to paint and then pressured to give up and seclude herself in a convent. Navarro’s painting seems to try to recreate The Venus of the mirror by Velázquez, a masterpiece of the Golden Age, with a young woman who poses naked from behind and whose identity has never been revealed. In Navarro’s painting it is also not known for sure who the woman is whose back is seen in the foreground, with her face and chest reflected in a mirror. According to the legends of the time, it is a self-portrait. The family’s displeasure upon finding out and the criticism from the social environment seems to have pushed her to enter a convent and hang up her paintbrushes. The oil painting is property of the Provincial Council of Granada and has not suffered incidents like Velázquez’s Venus, property of the National Gallery, attacked in March 1914 with a butcher’s ax by the suffragette Mary Richardson. The seven cuts that the fabric suffered were repaired by the museum’s restoration service.
There is no shortage of nude portraits of the biggest names in show business. The most striking in the exhibition stars Bella Otero, the Spanish dancer of gypsy origin who managed to succeed in France. She was quite a legend, whom Ignacio Zuloaga photographed naked in her dressing room in 1936. She, very young at the time, although her age cannot be specified, poses sitting on the faralaes dress, adorning her shoulders with a black lace bullfighter’s hat. and wears very high red heels.
Oterito is followed by a series of paintings in which the sexual ambiguity of men and women takes center stage. The god of fruit (1936), by Gabriel Morcillo, lent by the Bank of Spain, or fountain path (1935), by Teresa Condominas, are two excellent examples.
In much of the century covered by the exhibition, there are already quite a few women artists who fight to make their work known, but their presence in the exhibition is quite meager. In fact, only five appear: Teresa Condeminas, Menchu Gal, Maruja Mallo, Aurelia Navarro and Amèlia Riera. “We would have liked to have more,” responds Lourdes Moreno, “but it was not about simply applying quotas either. “We have chosen based on the work, without thinking about the genre of authorship.”
International avant-garde
In the wake of the purest international avant-garde, The mannequins (1939), by Gregorio Prieto. The iconography of the painter from Valdepeñas, a member of the generation of ’27, recalls the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
A selection of nude drawings by Joan Miró dated between 1018 and 1937 reproduce deformed figures in attitudes that go beyond mere eroticism and lead to a space populated with sculptural pieces by Dalí, Picasso, Baltasar Lobo and Julio González.
JORGE ZAPATA (EFE)
Why make an exhibition about the nude at a time when criticism of the genre is raining down? “Because it was an old project and we wanted it,” responds Lourdes Moreno, who claims not to be afraid of the most conservative criticism.
The tour closes with a spectacular selection presided over by a lithograph on paper by Joan Miró in which three black brush strokes resolve the presence of sex, a photomontage by Josep Renau dedicated to the memory of Alberto Sánchez (1978) and one of the most ironic works by Eduardo Arroyo, Spain looked at you (1967), painted in Paris and belonging to a series in which the artist laughs at the worshipers of certain artists (Goya, in this case) and criticizes the political situation in Spain at that time, in which there was no freedom of expression. performance or expression.