Madrid, Spain - Sargent/Sorolla, an exhibition jointly organized by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Fundación Caja Madrid and the Ministry of Culture. It brings together a total of 113 works and offers a parallel presentation of the careers of two painters: John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla. Sargent and Sorolla were working at the same time but were notably different with regard to birth, education and personality.  Shared features between the two included mutual knowledge and admiration for each other’s work but above all various important aspects of their painting, as the present exhibition aims to reveal.  The exhibition will be simultaneously shown in the temporary exhibition rooms of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and those of Fundación Caja Madrid.  It then moves to France, and from 12 February until 13 May 2007 it can be seen at the Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

With some small variations in the selection of works to be shown in Madrid and Paris, the paintings on display have been loaned from more than 50 different sources, both private collections and museums world-wide.  Particularly substantial loans have been made by the Museo Sorolla, Madrid, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Hispanic Society of America, New York, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Musée d’Orsay and the Petit Palais, Paris.

Two Parallel Careers

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) worked at a period when Impressionism achieved universal fame and recognition.  Despite always remaining apart from this movement, both artists have on occasions been considered Impressionists.  Among other reasons this is due to a shared characteristic: their interest in the effects of light and color.  Both aimed to produce a modern type of painting, but a highly individual one that took its starting-point as the naturalist tradition.  It was this naturalist creed that led to their attraction to Velázquez, in common with a number of the Impressionists, focused on the use of color and light as expressive devices inherent to painting and also on a virtuoso handling of the brush.

The principal difference between these two solitary artists and Impressionism or other avant-garde movements – they were in fact contemporaries of the Post-impressionist generation – is once again, another shared point: the commercial and social success that both enjoyed.  In addition to encouraging their natural tendency towards the virtuoso, their quest for success led Sargent and Sorolla towards three types of subject-matter considered “traditional” or “classical” and thus not popular with avant-garde artists: genre painting, the portrait and decorative commissions.

Their endeavors in the field of decorative painting have tended to be forgotten in more recent times and both artists suffered considerably from their personal and artistic failure regarding these schemes.  Nonetheless, the major decorative cycles that they produced for important public institutions, undertaken by both men with enormous enthusiasm, deserve to be re-examined, and a large part of the exhibition is devoted to them.

In the case of Sargent, the portrait was the genre that brought him most success among his contemporaries.  Viewed in his day as a new Lawrence or a modern Van Dyck, Sargent can be seen in retrospect as the last great representative of the classical portrait tradition.  The decline in social conventions within this genre at the end of the 19^th century was one of the reasons for Sargent’s negative reception in modern art circles.  However, as Picasso and Matisse’s work reveals, the portrait survived modern art and from a contemporary viewpoint Sargent and Sorolla’s portraits can now be appreciated as extremely interesting.  A similar situation arose with genre painting, Sorolla’s favorite field.  He adopted new approaches and made various transformations within the genre, imbuing some works with a rigorous realism and others with a lyricism that has the immediacy of a painted diary.

Having achieved success relatively early, both Sargent and Sorolla had the resources and abilities to devote themselves to the most modern of artistic endeavors: painting for themselves.  The linear model of art history that historians of modern art tended to impose on the art of the 20^th century has obscured this phase in their careers, resulting in a lack of consideration comparable to the situation of late Impressionism in its day.  The present exhibition will aim to demonstrate that, as with Monet, it was in the last twelve or fifteen years of their lives that Sargent and Sorolla’s work reached a peak of passion and pictorial excellence which for which it should ultimately be remembered.

The layout of the exhibition aims to reveal all these parallels and affinities between the two artists.  It devotes alternating rooms to the two artists, with two points at which their work is shown together: group and formal portraits, and late figure paintings:

Painting in a Modern World

Joaquín Sorolla was born in Valencia in 1863, the child of a humble family.  At the age of two his parents died and he was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle.  Little interested in his school studies, he was enormously attracted to painting and drawing.  Eventually he enrolled in the Escuela de Artesanos (Craft School) in Valencia where he attended evening classes in drawing given by Cayetano Capuz, subsequently studying at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (San Carlos Fine Arts Academy) in the same city.  A visit to the Museo del Prado in 1881 aroused his admiration for Velázquez, Ribera and El Greco.  In 1884 Sorolla was awarded a grant by the Regional Government of Valencia to study in Italy, where he lived from 1885 to 1889.  During his years as a student he met the photographer Antonio García who became his protector and whose daughter Clotilde married Sorolla in 1888.  Between 1889 and 1895 the couple had three children, María, Joaquín and Elena, moving to Madrid in 1890.  From that moment on Sorolla embarked on an active plan to promote his professional activities, taking part in a large number of national and international exhibitions with the support of important dealers and galleries.  In 1900 he won the Medal of Honour at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1906 the artist held an exhibition at the Georges Petit gallery in Paris which made him the leading artistic attraction of the season and definitively established his reputation in Europe. 

This was followed by a series of exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne and Dusseldorf which enjoyed critical success and strong sales.  In 1908 Sorolla was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London organized by the dealers Chesser, Mundy & Holt and supported by the painters Beruete and Sargent.  In 1909 and 1911 Sorolla held various exhibition in the United States promoted by the Hispanist Archer M. Huntington who became his great patron and commissioned from the artist the decoration of the library of the Hispanic Society of New York depicting scenes from the regions of Spain.  To carry out this commission Sorolla traveled tirelessly around Spain, an activity that eventually undermined his health and in 1920 he had a stroke, never working again before his death three years later.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. His father, a successful American doctor, and his mother, the daughter of a wealthy tradesman, had moved to Europe permanently, frequently changing residence.  Sargent received his first painting lessons from Carl Welsch, a German-American landscape painter.  In 1873 he enrolled at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence.  Soon after the family moved to Paris and Sargent began to study in the studio of Carolus-Duran where he made contact with the Impressionists and was particularly interested in the work of Manet.  In 1879 he travelled around Spain where he made frequent visits to the Museo del Prado and copied various works by Velázquez, an artist who would always remain important for him along with other masters of the past such as Goya and Frans Hals.  Sargent’s desire to establish himself as a portraitist in Paris were cut short by the scandal provoked by his portrait of Virginie Gautreau – known as Madame X – exhibited at the Salon.  In 1885-86.

Sargent joined the colony of artists and writers in Broadway, Worcestershire in England. In a short space of time he became the most adored portraitist of British and North American high society, painting magnates such as Rockefeller or Vanderbilt, presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and intellectuals such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James.  In 1890 Sargent was commissioned to paint the mural scheme for the Boston Public Library which was installed in 1916.  He rejected an offer to paint the coronation portrait of Edward VII.  In 1907 the British government proposed him for a knighthood, an honor he was unable to due to his American nationality.  Between 1903 and 1912 Sargent traveled around Spain, Italy and France and in 1905 visited Syria and Palestine.  On the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he visited the front in France as an official war artist.  During these years the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired Madame X, while Sargent turned down the position of President of the Royal Academy (London).  In 1919 he returned to Boston as he had been commissioned to decorate the Museum of Fine Arts in that city. In 1924 an important exhibition of his works was held at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. Sargent died in his sleep on 15 April 1925 in London.  On 24 April his funeral was held in Westminster Abbey.

PUBLICATIONS

Published to coincide with the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue has reproductions of all works on display and includes essays by Tomàs Llorens, curator of the exhibition and former Chief Curator of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; Robert Rosenblum, Senior Professor of Fine Arts at the University of New York.  It also includes texts by other leading specialists such as Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, authors of the Catalogue raisonné of Sargent; Blanca Pons-Sorolla, author of the Catalogue raisonné of Sorolla, Felipe Garín, Facundo Tomás, Javier Barón, Mary Crawford-Volk, Marcus B. Burke, Carlos Reyero, Pilar de Miguel and Florencio de Santa-Ana, Director of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid. Published in Spanish, English and French.  There will also be an educational guide to the exhibition.

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