On this peaceful Sunday morning, without the usual hustle and bustle of business, he decided, with peace of mind, to walk the streets and corners of the Old Town of Santa Cruz neighborhood and revisit the museum of fine arts (MUBAG). In the magnificent Historic-Artistic Memorial Palace of the Count of Lumiares (S.XVIII) on Gravina street in Alicante. After a real spring-autumn, with a little delay, the cold and humidity of our Mediterranean Sea has finally arrived, albeit for a short time, so we can wear and dress in our warm clothes that we have been hiding for most of the year. , given the kindness of the climate we enjoy in this bright and warm city.
Arriving at MUBAG on our tour, we saw on its main façade a transparent showcase that houses the new open exhibition proposal that the current administration of the museum has deemed fit to name La Ventana del Arte. In the piece, we consider the figurative trajectory of the painter Javier Lorenzo and the painting El espectador de las estaciones, which pays homage to Vicente Rodes.
Entering the museum, we climb the stairs of the bright central space surrounded by two large canvases, where our unforgettable and endearing artist Gastón Castelló is depicted with stylized representations of traditional scenes of the Alicante landscape, among different themes and painted motifs. figures, settings and traditions, as in the 17th century Pa beneït: clavarises selected from the Torremanzanas, decorated with flowers and finely embroidered fabrics, or handmade bread cake that unmarried girls carry on their heads in a spring parade. To Sant Gregori. As an anecdote and an unforgettable memory, I will admit that in 1972, when I was an aspiring plastic creator in my twenties, I saw the good Gastón do the big canvas with the aforementioned popular representation. As if he were a Renaissance artist, he painted on a scaffolding in the hall-stairway leading to the former CAPA (Alicante Provincial Savings Bank) where it was exhibited for many years. Noticing how the young man (whom he had already known from his visit with Julio Esplá, the construction workshop in Fogueres on Benito Pérez Galdós street) was watching his work silently and with interest, he interrupted his work and made a gesture and did not come down from his pier to greet me and explain to me in detail what he represented. He showed kindness.
As we access and visit the first floor of MUBAG, we are transported into the artistic spirit of the past, as if in an imaginary time machine, because in this way we can contemplate and evaluate the meaning of the artifacts in the museum collection. Religious in the arts departments. The splendor of an era, Neoclassicism and Romanticism and the 19th century. The collection is in the light.
By saving distance and scale, you get the feeling that you are visiting a small Prado Museum in Alicante. An appendix showing, among others, interesting works of religious painting from the 16th and 17th centuries, and helping to understand the evolution and transformation of art, mainly of the pictorial genre, originally conceived and practiced in workshops or schools. evolved into studios for individual artists, until they pictorially captured artistic themes and outdoor documentaries. Alongside the pictorial works, sculptures, furniture, and other works of art are also displayed, emphasizing the concept, development, relevance, and meaning of artistic objects over time. As noted in one of its explanatory panels, the 19th century as the central axis of the explanatory discourse of a valuable part of MUBAG’s work. A century marked by the political, social and cultural changes that define artistic and literary creation. Demonstrations marching together towards progress and the turn of the century.
In MUBAG’s ambitious planning and goals, we observe that this museum is not content with only exhibiting its own collection, but also restores, exhibits and disseminates its works in collaboration with other important institutions and museums along with its collections and projects. Various collections and special contributions such as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the Valencia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the Banco Sabadell Collection of the Alicante City Council. It is worth emphasizing the important and close collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado, with twenty-eight works currently on loan.
weather in Sorolla
On our tour, we were noted for the museum’s latest temporary exhibition project, Joaquín Sorolla, and his alleged Valencia painting of his time. Dialogues and contrasts, we go up to the second floor to contemplate the exhibition in question for the third time. Curated by the historian Francisco Javier Pérez Rojas, this exhibition, programmed by MUBAG to commemorate the centennial of the death of this great Valencian painter, opens the celebration of the Year of Sorolla in the Community of Valencia. In it, relations and concerns of an artistic time are established in various joint or contrasting pictorial debates between leading Valencian and Spanish artists.
At first I was tempted by Sorolla’s famous Impressionist pictorial work, with graceful female figures in soft white dresses, children with glowing naked bodies on the seashore, or bright seascapes and scenes of boats with caressed sails. (In this last iconography of the master, we observe that, with the exception of the marina or Playa de Valencia / Pescadoras (c.1910) with two stranded boats on the seashore, the work is hardly seen and cannot be appreciated in the exhibition. Tomás Murillo Ramos’ boats on the beach, clearly influenced by the Sorollesque) .
Contemplating this rich and comprehensive exhibition of one hundred and fifteen pieces, showing only sixteen paintings by Joaquín Sorolla (and two precious works by his daughter, María Clotilde Sorolla García), we realize that we have been there before. It is a project where, in addition to exhibiting the works of the famous Valencian master, many works by other important artists of his time. We are also faced with an exhibition that moves away from presenting Sorolla’s typical themes and reveals the artist’s other recordings. We are aware that Sorolla is a versatile creative painter; In addition to creating his magnificent landscapes in the open air like no other, he masterfully mastered other subjects in which the pictorial genre of portraiture should be emphasized. one was exhibited in Don Cristino Martos (1893). The artistic genre that painters made to order for the upper social classes at that time.
This exhibition establishes a reflection, analysis and dialogue on the meaning of the work of early contributions by artists who had a decisive influence on Sorolla, such as Oriolan’s Joaquín Agrasot, orientalist Muñoz Degrain, Ignacio Pinazo and Alcoy’s Emilio Sala. Also, besides Sorolla, other artists of his generation such as Cecilio Pla, José Benlliure Gil, Mariano García Mas or Constantino Gómez take part. Dialogue with key figures such as Ramón Casas and the great painter and influential artist Mariano Fortuny, with the contribution of Valencian creators and other leading schools such as Catalan. Likewise, Sorolla’s disciple painters such as Manuel Benedito, José Mongrell, Pons Arnau and Emilio Varela are on display with their sensitive and sincere contributions. In short, we are faced with an exhibition that is not structured in a purely chronological order in its complexity, but tries to intertwine the different stories, iconographic processes and visions of artists in that context and in the past with its diversity.
Sara Navarro’s Designs
To finish the tour, we move to the entrance floor of the museum for the day. In this way, we confront ourselves with the reality and objectivity of contemporary art with a new and surprising exhibition: Art as Inspiration. The Sara Navarro Collection, an exhibition cleverly planned and curated by Begoña Deltell around the protagonist of the Wizard of Oz story. It brings together about fifty works by interesting national and international artists, with the Alicante designer’s best-known creations in the footwear industry. In this unique exhibition project written by a determined businesswoman from our land, we can refer to the concept of empowerment, which is rooted in the thought of Marxist Antonio Gramsci and postmodernist Michel Foucault. And, in particular, to the empowerment of women in relation to the scope of gender equality and the achievements of women today. Confronted with the subordination and inequality of women in the past, today’s women have gained power and control in their personal lives and social influence thanks to their own merits. This is the case of Sara Navarro, who, by combining intelligence, determination and sensitivity, has succeeded in combining her commercial activity with great talent and her elegance as a creative shoe designer fueled by the art-oriented collectibles of our time. All of this was presented as a business and art project attached to an internationally projected stage. The exhibition shows the reality of today’s society and art with its various contrasts and great conceptual and formal multiplicity.
As my colleague and friend Diumenge Boronat, who was with me on the stage of this exhibition, rightly stated, MUBAG is undoubtedly a Fine Arts museum that directs its research and gaze to the artistic tradition of the past, but it is also a museum that reveals itself to us as a living institution open to the present. A museum that has recently exhibited important projects that arouse great depth and interest for art lovers.