Spain entered an era of industrial modernization, social ferment born from an organized workers movement, and scientific advances that would reshape medicine. At the same time, waves of migration transformed Spain and the destinations of those who left. Yet those years also carried the weight of obscurantism, religious influence, and stark social inequalities that slowed progress in a country that has often struggled to step toward modernity.
The changes and currents from that period are what the leading masters captured in Arte y transformaciones sociales en Spain (1885-1910). Javier Solana presented the collection this Monday as the season’s major show and one of the most ambitious exhibitions organized by the Prado. The President of the Patronage described it as a chance to understand how the turn of the century remodeled Spanish society and culture, shaping the Spain we know today, through the work of creators such as Picasso, Sorolla, Solana, and Juan Gris, among many others.
The Prado’s new exhibition brings together 300 works. Most belong to the museum’s own holdings, though only a fraction have been shown continuously before because space limits the display of a warehouse-filled collection. Many pieces come from other institutions or private collections. The show is so expansive that it fills the entire space reserved for temporary exhibitions.
A focus on painting with important photography
Across the galleries, organized by themes such as agricultural labor, medicine and illness, and prostitution, paintings of varying formats are shown alongside sculptures. These rooms are complemented by compact annexes that gather additional works in media more typical of the period, including posters, photographs, and graphic art. There is even a final room devoted to cinema production where early films from 1895 onward are screened, marking cinema’s emergence as a new art form.
The idea was described by Javier Barón, chief conservator of 19th-century painting and curator of the show, who noted that photography provided a model for painting because it achieved a level of precision painters could only obtain after far greater effort. A large canvas required months of work, while a photograph captured a moment with exactness that naturalist painting sought to achieve.
From the 1880s, artists such as Darío de Regoyos proposed alternative treatments of the same topics, prompting a broader view beyond pure naturalism. By 1900, many works in this exhibition show that naturalism alone could not represent social realities, partly because cinema and photography could render realism more directly. This encouraged many artists to diverge from the dominant current.
Objectivity and large formats
Even so, the most striking aspect of the exhibition is the suite of monumental canvases that document worker protests with stark objectivity. Among them is Vicente Cutanda’s powerful Vizcaya workers’ strike from 1892, which opens the catalog and presents a view of a metalworks gathering. The scene evokes Zola’s Germinal and invites comparison with the era’s social realism. Also striking is Luis Jiménez Aranda’s 1889 painting of a hospital ward during a chief physician’s visit, where a group of students accompanies a doctor to a patient, underscoring advances in hygiene and hospital administration.
In the section on emigration, focused on the late 19th century outflow to the Americas, Emigrants (1908) by Ventura Álvarez Sala depicts a lifelike moment as a small boat nears a transoceanic liner and emigrants climb the gangway.
A two-meter-long painting created when the artist was only sixteen reveals Picasso facing realism. Ciencia y caridad (1897) shows a physician tending a patient at home while a nun assists, with the doctor shown as the father figure of the Málaga genius and his teacher.
Other approaches and subjects
In addition to the great naturalist canvases, visitors encounter many works that move away from strict realism and experiment with brushwork, light, and subject matter. Several pieces emphasize darkness and tragedy, including Spain’s dark-themed pieces aligned with symbolism painted by Regoyos such as Victims of a Festival (1894), a macabre image of horses slain by bulls at San Fermín, or Visita de pésame (1886), a somber scene defined by shadows. Gutiérrez Solana’s The Castaways (1908) shows a group of disabled or deformed children under the watch of monks in a desolate field with El Escorial in the distance, reflecting Greco’s influence and the earlier echoes of Velázquez in other works of the period.
Sorolla’s scenes, by contrast, often explore light with a depth closer to realism, as seen in The Return from Fishing (1894) and Pescado caro, still a vivid portrayal of maritime labor, while Preparación de la pasa (1900) hints at impressionism within rural painting. Sorolla is presented as a socially conscious artist, highlighting doctors and scientists as a new ethical model in A Research (1897) and denouncing injustices in Treat of Prostitutes (1895), which portrays a group of women headed toward a life of prostitution.
The exhibition unfolds a journey from the working world—fields, the sea, factories—through education, religion, medicine, death, and emigration. Prostitution appears as another focal point, approached in some works as explicit social critique and in others through the perspective of the prostitutes themselves. In the section dedicated to this theme, drawings by Juan Gris depict luxury courtesans in Chinese ink, alongside a notable selection of erotic photography from the period. These photographs offer a visual throughline across the entire visit, from barricades and demonstrations to photographs of arrested anarchists after the Liceu bombing in Barcelona to scenes of skin diseases, fires, shipwrecks, and collapsing buildings.
The show does not include a dedicated chapter on the 1898 disaster—wars of independence and the loss of colonies that deeply affected Spain at the time. The curator explained that focusing on this would have disrupted the exhibition’s unity, a topic already treated in other sections.
Among the more than 300 works on display, only two are by women: an educational scene of a crowded drawing class by Elvira Santiso and a late-section painting by María Luisa Puiggener, a Cádiz-born artist who denounced the misery seen in early 20th-century Seville through a painting of a mendicant mother with her child. The Prado’s director explained that the show Invited explained why such gender representation gaps persisted, noting that women had long been denied access to certain forms of narrative art and were often confined to marginal genres that did not capture social realities.