Spanish Artists in Rome (1892)
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Art criticism, written from Rome and printed over three pages of a leading Viennese art weekly: Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik. Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Kunst, Kunstgewerbe, Musik, Theater und Literatur, ed. Wilhelm Lauser, XVI. Bd., Nr. 2 (Vienna, 1892, Zweites Jännerheft), pp. 36–38. She was already a regular contributor of poems and novellas to this journal, and this proved to be the first of a series: two further surveys followed in the spring of 1892, on the German and Austrian painters in Rome and on the Roman sculptors' workshops. For that half-year at least she was the paper's Rome correspondent. She was thirty-seven, five years past the Berlin jury that threw out Mors Imperator, and she writes as a working painter who has been let into the studios — Palmaroli's academy, Gallegos, Pradilla, Poveda, Álvarez, the three Benlliure brothers, Enrique Serra, and Villegas in his Moorish villa on the edge of the Campagna.
Spanish Artists in Rome
By Hermine v. Preuschen
The old artists' Rome of Veit, Overbeck, Canova, on whose lustre one generation of artists after another has fed, has become once again the headquarters of the most modern artistic striving.
Not out of the academic severity of the French Villa Medici, not out of the Italian studios of a Conelli, a Sartorio and an Andor, nor through Siemiradzki's Torches of Nero or a few able, unsquandered German and Austrian artists has this force come that is to cleanse the malarial air of the Roman art-swamp with the tramontana of great ability and great will, but solely out of the school of the Spaniards, from Madrid and Valencia. That school has slowly and surely altered the whole physiognomy of the modern artists' Rome.
Old Rome has been conquered anew — by the Spaniards. They have run their flag of victory up there in the newly built Spanish Academy beside Pietro in Montorio, whose director Palmaroli drills whole dozens of new pupils so that they too shall come at us “in Spanish.”1 Spanish — what we, what the whole art trade understands by it today, is the summit, the perfection of artistic, technical and painterly ability, mostly in the most minute execution and the smallest format conceivable, or else in giant history pictures, quickening the old affairs of state with a new spirit. Every spring there is a rendezvous here in Rome of the art dealers of every nationality, competing for the pearls out of the Spanish studios. The poor German artists working and drinking here must of course pay for this preference for the Spanish. But the solution to the riddle of the Spanish successes — is industry. Iron, inexorable industry, the craftsman's spirit, as Nietzsche says2, the systematic, tireless making and wrestling, to subdue every material, even the most difficult.
At first glance the Spanish schools have a great deal in common, above all the exceptionally high technique and the luminously clear tone of the air — over the Spanish open-air pictures an eternally blue, glaring sky laughs, and there lies a clarity that lets even the most distant thing still appear distinct and coloured. Whatever their names, all these young and younger masters (I have not found a single really “old” one among them), at bottom they all seem to be the children of the great, all too early departed Fortuny, whose painting brought about a real revolution in Paris ten years ago. But their peculiarity must also rest in part on their Romance nationality — I have yet to see a German, though certainly many an Italian artist, paint “in Spanish.”
There are curious contradictions in them: a glowing seriousness and restless industry — a wrestling after the painterly, the fantastic, the decoratively coloured, after dark and cruel, bloodthirsty scenes; and then again they are the fashion-painters par excellence, the painters of “chic,” who paint only what the public and the art trade demand of them. And it is not that these contradictions show only in the mass; no, every single one of them has something of all of it. Above all, though, the ability, the incredible ability, which summons them again and again to works of art of the first rank and — to tightrope tricks. Their studios are for the most part princely, fitted out with the finest understanding and a mad extravagance, mostly several rooms side by side, each more sumptuous than the last. If Gallegos, for instance, were not so great a painter, he would still be one of the greatest collectors of art and antiquities. Spanish church treasures indeed (carvings, gold embroideries, pictures and architectural fragments) are his speciality. Gallegos is likewise one in whom all the curious contradictions are fully borne out. I saw only miniatures from his hand, but of a downright astonishing working-out of every detail. His hobby is pompous church scenes in Spanish churches of state blackened with incense. He has hung all his pictures and studies with brocade, so that he can show the viewer, strictly according to the measure of his favour, whatever seems to him fitting. Among other things I saw the sketch of a dark church interior with a group of white-veiled nuns and, as the only coloured thing in the picture, a downright glowing, many-coloured window. An open-air procession in Venice (which the Spaniards love best of all after their own churches, for the sake of its rich painterly detail) showed so radiant an air, so burning a colour, that I was almost seized with longing for some blurred line, some indefiniteness3 in all that victorious certainty of eminent ability.
Pradilla is always named as one of the first; but with equal right one might set Villegas or Alvarez or the younger José Benlliure in his place. All of them are as perfect on huge canvases as on the smallest little panels with hundreds of span-long figures. Indeed the Spaniards can paint essentially anything. Mostly, though, one sees Spanish scenes of the people, bullfights — and church festivals, no doubt because the public and the art dealers want these most. Here, then, we should be back at the border of chic- and fashion-painting. There is often little “soul” in the Spanish pictures, and yet — some unregarded landscape sketch, dusty in the furthest corner of a studio, discloses to us a world of artistic feeling, of mood, of “art-soul.” And after all, what does all this soul help, in feeling artists' hearts, if one does not master the technique? They are then like flute-players who melt away all their love in bungled notes. But perhaps it is granted to the painting of the future to unite the fullest ability with eminent artistic feeling.
Pradilla is probably the most versatile of all the Spaniards. Among the reproductions of earlier works I saw wall decorations governed by the sweep of a Tiepolo, whom he knows very exactly, by the way, and reveres. Then again the most modern pieces of effect, landscape moods and purely decorative lunettes with wonderfully finely felt genii. One of them, with poppies on a pale ground, is among the most enchanting things to be seen in that kind. To Pradilla's best-known picture, the “Surrender of Granada,”4 I saw further studies and drawings of the most incredible execution. The picture itself is, as is well known, together with a series of miniature scenes from the Roman carnival which are among the master's best works, in the Villa Gambard at Nice, at the discoverer and — exploiter of Rosa Bonheur5.
One of the youngest, but truly not the least considerable among the Roman Spaniards, is Poveda. I saw at his place one of the famous well-heads of Venice, quite silver-grey, in luminous air. Before it a child dressed in white feeding the pigeons of St Mark's. In the background a great white cat, lying in wait. This too, so far as one can judge it unfinished, will be a work of art of the first rank, and not only in its downright wonderful execution. The artist told me that he had worked the well-head, which measures six centimetres square at the most, in 18, say eighteen sittings6 from nature. Which of the German artists living here can boast of such seriousness, such energy?
Alvarez, who belongs among the most considerable of the older representatives of the Spaniards here (he counts forty-five years at the most), will work in Rome only this one winter more and then take up a teaching post at the Madrid Academy. His is the large picture that caused a stir at the last Berlin exhibition, “King Philip in the Escorial,” which he sold there twice over. His artistic development is very curious. As quite a young man he painted a little rococo scene in the manner of Fortuny, with the most perfect taste and perfect technique. From then on he was positively buried under commissions of that kind, and in a large album of photographs of his works we see the richest and most opulent rococo figures. With time he turns to the Empire — his well-known picture of that sort, “The Visit to the House of Mourning,” which likewise won a decisive success at the Berlin International, is an illustration of it. But his motives, at first downright bewilderingly rich, now grow ever simpler; his mind strives ever more towards a certain grandeur of style; and in his “Philip in the Escorial” (the first landscape he has attempted) we see, in a still, sombre, simple world of high mountains, on the plainest of chairs, the king dreaming darkly into the distance. There Alvarez is so far removed from chic that it seems downright impossible that he of all people was its most considerable representative.
And now to the Benlliure family!7 Two brothers are painters; the third and youngest is a sculptor in the manner of Bernini, with such passionate attack in his virtuoso realist work that he is bitterly assailed by all the representatives of the “antique” as “crude in feeling.” But there is a downright kindling and compelling genius in his work.
His brother Juan, very talented, especially in portraits, would tell for more if the brother José, the painter of the Colosseum, did not exist. He is also much distressed that almost everywhere in Paris and Germany he is confused with this brother and can arrive at no independent reputation, in spite of the most various additions to the name of Benlliure. He too is much recognized in Spain, and one picture, “Genre rustique,” earned him its purchase for the state there and the gold medal.
Of course, he cannot measure himself against José. Here too, in this most singular of all the artists, we again see the strangest mixture of genius, “madness” and convention lying peaceably side by side. The same fantast who created the wonderful Vision in the Colosseum paints alongside it one “little dark picture” after another, all of them, admittedly, mostly church scenes, splendidly carried through. If the art dealers are going to demand open-air pictures, he will paint those too, as he tells me laughing, everything always according to their wish!8 I also saw there, by the way, another very fantastic moonlight-ghost sketch, in which Francis of Assisi calls up the souls of his followers. José Benlliure is at work on a very large picture, “The Wine-Tasting,” a dark cellar with wine casks, in front a table at which several Spanishly trimmed peasants deliberately test the new wine. In this picture he means to prove how far one can go in realism at all, and he is putting all his strength into it. The work promises, naturally, something quite considerable as far as technique goes.
The studios of José Benlliure too are wonderful. As a collector he distinguishes himself by his splendid Moorish majolica, which is becoming so high in price and so rare. By the hundred the glorious plates, jugs and dishes shine down, with their red-blue iridescent lustre of mother-of-pearl, from all the oriental gold embroideries of his studio walls. When one hears José Benlliure speak at any length about his aims and his striving, one forgets all his dark dealers' interiors. A nearly fanatical glow shines then out of his eyes, and one understands how he of all people had to paint the Colosseum picture. His family, by the way, boasts of immediate Moorish descent.
Enrique Serra too belongs, at least in his small landscape sketches, among the very most considerable. There he really takes nature by the soul; I should like therefore to call him a landscape-psychologist9. Of course, when he then works them up in the studio into large pictures, they now and then take on something smooth and porcelain-like. Only the outer garment of it is left behind. I saw also a small animated market scene in which the abundance of glaring yellow oranges contrasted wonderfully with the flesh-tone of the women selling them — or harmonized with it. The tone of the air over the whole was again genuinely Spanish, luminous! The conception was inspired. I hope the picture stays as glorious when it is finished.
How many there would still be — going by their dexterity — to name. But they are mostly purely external artists. So I will turn only to Villegas. Perhaps in him is to be found the essence of all the Spanish character; in him technical perfection and inward artistry coincide most brilliantly. External success has lifted him highest of all so far. He too is of Moorish descent, and boasts of it, and seeks to make it good in his outward life. Far out in the Campagna, behind the new Ludovisi rental quarter and the botched Villa Albani, the old gardens of Sallust10, the “Villa moresca” rises in the purest Alhambra style in lavish splendour. Like a tale out of the “Thousand and One Nights” it surrounds us when we stand in the open, column-borne central court adorned with Moorish inscriptions. And how wonderfully decked out are the inner rooms, nearly all of them mystically dark! Never did I see such taste bound up with such luxury. Old Spanish furniture, Moorish marble fragments, modern art objects. All together it gives an utterly singular whole, worlds apart from the decorations of the Makart studio and yet at least as beautiful and as fantastic.
Wonderful is a narrow, pale-blue Japanese cabinet, painted out and fitted up entirely by the master on satin, here and there with ingenious “Gschnas” inventions11. In the two proper studios, mightily large, there is adjustable top light. It falls full on a giant picture, the crowning of a Doge and a Dogaressa in the Quattrocento12. Every single figure is carried through in the most perfect manner. The colours are dazzling; the “luminous light,” if one may put it so, that floods over everything — Spanish. Most admirable of all is the Quattrocento type of every head. Like the figures of Boccaccio made flesh! Naturally they have all borrowed heavily from Sandro Botticelli, in everything, in colour, form, bearing and expression. But what does it matter, if Villegas so re-creates the old, the still unfinished, with the most modern ability? If in such “historical pictures” he can render us the character of the age like that? And that is probably his most peculiar strength, this inspired penetration and fertilizing of empty “historical” facts. That is the old and yet the wholly new in this history painter of the newest date. The well-known Doge studies too, with the nightcap, from the Berlin exhibition, I admired afresh. No, there is no “more genuine” history painter at all. But how could he attain such genuineness without the most intimate, most painstaking leaning on the old masters? Many beautiful sketches and landscape studies I saw as well, and the dead bullfighter (from the Munich exhibition), the much-admired one, that chic genre piece with the magnificent working-out of all the gold-embroidered stuffs.
But what technical thing could still astonish me among the Spaniards! Behind the garden Villegas has built large studios for his pupils, of whom Vinegra is the best known.
From the flat roof of the Moorish villa there opens the most wonderful view over the Campagna, a mood full of poetry and solitude. The sun was sinking, the Sabine hills and the aqueducts glowed violet and rosy, and the solitary cypresses rose up into the air like dark velvet. But I went down again to the descendant of Botticelli and threw one last glance at the glorious picture. What are we poor German artists, after all, against the Spaniards?
Yes, the Spaniards!
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑come at us “in Spanish.” — Jemandem spanisch kommen — to come at somebody in Spanish — is the German idiom for behaving in a way that strikes one as odd or high-handed; spanisch vorkommen is to seem strange. She takes the dead idiom literally and makes it the thesis of the piece. The pun is the essay's engine and cannot be carried into English in one phrase. Spanisch in German means both the nationality and, idiomatically, the incomprehensible or the outrageous — das kommt mir spanisch vor, that seems fishy to me. So the sentence says at once that Palmaroli's pupils are trained to paint in the Spanish manner and that they are trained to affront us; and the paragraph then redefines the word a third way, as the art trade's term for a level of finish. She is writing for a Viennese art public that would have caught all three at once.
- ↑the craftsman's spirit, as Nietzsche says — Nietzsche had collapsed in 1889 and was being read everywhere by 1892; his argument that great work is craft and labour, not inspiration, runs through Human, All Too Human. To cite him in an art review this early is unusual, and she does it in a subordinate clause. The passage she has in mind is the group of aphorisms on genius and work in Human, All Too Human — "artists have an interest in there being a belief in sudden intuitions," against which Nietzsche sets the patient craftsman who learns his trade. It matters for her more than for her subject. Her own claim to the untranslatable word Genie rests on the opposite ground, on being born one; here she puts the whole Spanish victory down to iron industry, and admires it. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878))
- ↑longing for some blurred line, some indefiniteness — The centre of her criticism, and the sentence a Symbolist would write. Against total finish she wants something unresolved — the quality her own painting was attacked for lacking discipline in. It is worth setting this beside the date. In 1892 the Spanish school in Rome was the most technically finished painting in Europe and the most saleable; within a decade the market had moved to exactly the indefiniteness she is asking for here. She is not making a prophecy — she says elsewhere in the essay that she does not know what the painting of the future will be — but the instinct is a Symbolist's, and it is the same instinct that four years later made Rilke call her pictures poems.
- ↑the “Surrender of Granada,” — La rendición de Granada, painted for the Spanish Senate, where the large version has hung since 1882. What stood at Nice will have been the dealer's version or replica; she reports the studio's account of it. Pradilla's Surrender of Granada is one of the defining pictures of nineteenth-century Spain and belongs to the Senado in Madrid. Her sentence — "the picture itself is, as is well known, in the Villa Gambard at Nice" — cannot be true of that canvas, and the likeliest reading is that Gambart owned a repetition, which was ordinary practice with a dealer of his weight. Worth chasing precisely because she says it as common knowledge: it records what the Roman studios in 1892 believed about where the picture was.
- ↑the discoverer and — exploiter of Rosa Bonheur — Ernest Gambart (1814–1902), the Belgian dealer who made Rosa Bonheur an international name with The Horse Fair and took his percentage, and who kept a villa at Nice. The dash before "exploiter" is hers. Gambart was the most powerful picture dealer of the century in England, and Rosa Bonheur — a woman painter who wore trousers by police permit and became the most famous of her age — was his greatest property. Preuschen sets the two words against each other with a dash and does not explain them, in an essay whose argument is that the art trade now dictates what the Spaniards in Rome paint. She was thirty-seven, had had Mors Imperator thrown out of a Berlin exhibition five years earlier, and would spend her life without a Gambart.
- ↑in 18, say eighteen sittings — She writes the numeral and then spells it out, the way one repeats a figure that will not be believed. Six centimetres square, eighteen sittings, painted from the thing itself. This is the essay's hardest evidence and she knows it: not a judgement but a measurement, got from the painter in his studio. The sentence that follows turns it into the accusation the whole piece has been building — which of the German artists living here could boast of such seriousness? She had lived among those Germans in Rome for years, and she publishes the question in a Viennese paper.
- ↑And now to the Benlliure family! — The Valencian brothers: José (1855–1937), the painter, later himself director of the Spanish Academy in Rome; Juan Antonio (1859–1930), painter; and Mariano (1862–1947), the youngest, who became the most celebrated Spanish sculptor of his age. She has all three right, and their order. Mariano Benlliure went on to make the monuments and the royal tombs of Restoration Spain and to direct the Museo de Arte Moderno; José Benlliure directed the Spanish Academy in Rome from 1903 to 1912; Juan Antonio remained the least known of the three, which is exactly the complaint she records from his own mouth in the next paragraph. In January 1892 she walks into their studios and grades them, and the grading has held: the youngest was the one to watch.
- ↑as he tells me laughing, everything always according to their wish! — The essay's thesis handed to her in the studio by the painter himself, cheerfully. It is the one line in the piece that reads like a transcription rather than a judgement. She has spent five paragraphs arguing that the Roman Spaniards paint what the dealers order, and here the most admired of them says it to her face and laughs. Her exclamation mark carries the whole disagreement: he does not think it a scandal and she does. Note the tense of her verb — sagt, present — the only place in the essay where the studio talk comes through undated, as if still going on.
- ↑a landscape-psychologist — Landschaftspsychologe, coined on the spot and the best phrase in the essay — a painter who reads a place the way one reads a person. She would have taken it as praise of herself. Her own pictures were flower and still-life and symbolic compositions, but the charge always brought against her was the reverse of the one she brings here: too much soul, not enough finish. Coining landscape-psychologist for a Spaniard whose small sketches are better than his finished canvases, and then watching the studio versions turn "smooth and porcelain-like," is her whole argument in one artist. Note that she praises the sketch and distrusts the completion — in 1892, well before that was a safe opinion.
- ↑behind the new Ludovisi rental quarter and the botched Villa Albani, the old gardens of Sallust — She is reporting a demolition. The Villa Ludovisi and its gardens — among the most famous in Europe — were being sold off and built over with apartment blocks through the later 1880s; verhunzt, botched, is her verdict on what was done next door. The destruction of the Ludovisi gardens after Rome became the capital was the great preservation scandal of the age; Gregorovius wrote that the villa's ruin was a crime against the city, and Henry James mourned it. Her one clause — behind the new Ludovisi rental quarter and the botched Villa Albani, the old gardens of Sallust — puts three layers of Rome in a row: an antique horti, an eighteenth-century villa, and a speculative building site, with a Spanish painter's Alhambra rising beyond them. It is also a precise address for a house that is otherwise hard to place.
- ↑“Gschnas” inventions — Gschnas is Viennese: junk, fakery, and the sham-splendid objects made for the Künstlerhaus carnival balls out of paper and tin. She puts a Vienna studio word into a Roman palace, for readers who would laugh. The Gschnasfeste of the Vienna Künstlerhaus were famous — whole fantasy interiors built each year out of worthless material, the more convincing the better. Using the word for Villegas's decorations is affectionate and double-edged at once, and it is the clearest sign in the essay that she is writing for a specific city's readers rather than a general public. It also dates her: the great Gschnas years were Makart's, whose studio she names in the same paragraph.
- ↑the crowning of a Doge and a Dogaressa in the Quattrocento — Villegas's huge Coronation of the Dogaressa, which he worked at for years and finished later in the decade. She sees it on the easel under adjustable top light in January 1892 — a datable sighting of a picture in progress. The Coronation of the Dogaressa is now in the Museo Carmen Thyssen, Málaga, and is the work Villegas is chiefly remembered for. Her paragraph is a studio report of it years before completion, with the Botticelli borrowings noted to her face, and with the two other Venetian pictures — the Doge studies from the Berlin exhibition and the dead bullfighter from Munich — placed around it. For anyone dating the picture's progress, a witness who stood in front of it in the second January week of 1892 is worth having.
About the book
Spanische Künstler in Rom (“Spanish Artists in Rome”) ran over three pages of the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik — the illustrated Viennese weekly for art, applied art, music, theatre and literature, edited by Dr. Wilhelm Lauser — in the second January issue of 1892, signed Hermine v. Preuschen.
She was a regular contributor to the paper: poems and novellas of hers ran in it through 1890 and 1891, and it reproduced one of her paintings. No account of her records that she wrote criticism at all — and this turns out to be the first of a series. Two further surveys followed in the spring of 1892, Deutsche und österreichische Künstler in Rom and Römische Bildhauerwerkstätten, each three pages, each the same job: go round the studios of one group and report. For that half-year she was, in effect, the paper’s correspondent in Rome.
It is reported work — she has the run of the studios and writes down what she sees and what the painters tell her, including one who says, laughing, that he will paint open-air pictures the moment the dealers ask for them.
The journal is the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik (“General Art Chronicle”): the same Viennese paper that had reported the Mors Imperator affair in 1887.