The
avant-garde movement in Spanish painting is inevitably the
expressive and synthetic testimony of a specifically
Spanish reality, constantly subject to the permanent
requirements of Art. This reality, which is historical
because of its lack of stability and durability, depends
upon conditions imposed by time, but it has managed,
nevertheless, to survive in the Spanish setting for many
years and even for many countries. This explains why
although one cannot argue that it was born as the result
of a deliberate aim to create "something
Spanish", present-day Spanish art is thoroughly
Spanish and reveals family characteristics that confirm
the legitimacy of its parentage. It is true that the
tendency which stood out in the classical painters as a
strongly realistic one promoted by crude feeling, in line
with the tenets handed on by the old Masters, has become
expressionism of a most violent kind in the avant-garde
painters of today.
In
needs little though to realize that the expressionist
branches of this family spring some from the same
realistic trunk. It is equally obvious that they are alike
in nature; just as realism is governed by a very high
capacity for expression, so expressionism is in its turn
subjected to considerable pressure by reality.
In
a world, where all painting was representative by
definition, realism could not identify itself purely by
giving a faithful representation of reality. That kind of
painting was realistic, because it was directly governed
by reality and not by the representation of it. This was
because it was not meditated by Plato's ideal concept of
form; the concept whereby the great Italian Renaissance
painters, for example, insisted that what established
contact with the spectator was the harmonious play of
ideally conceived forms, rather than any expression of the
reality they represented.
In
the case of the great Italian classical masterpieces the
meditating formulas were precisely concerned with glossing
over all the more unpleasant features of everybody life,
producing a sort of evened-out, average life, pattern and
class, half way between actual reality and its expression.
In the case of Spanish painting, however, reality was
brought nearer to its expression by the powerful urgency,
the peremptory and dramatic substances of life itself; it
was a rough, uncouth way of life, with no allowances made
for any sort of mediatization or idealization - it lacked
a middle way, it lacked even middle-class. This total
absence of half-measures made Spain a country of great
contrasts.
Painting
is the more expressive the less ideally subject, it is to
any law of formal proportions. Expression implies a break
with the law that propounds the equation of formal
balance. The gesture, which leads to expression, is
precisely one that breaks away from the law of impassivity
and the terms, which would enforce the balancing of forms.
The strength of Spanish classical painting derives from
its indifference to the lack of formal compensation and
its natural leanings towards gesticulate de-compensation:
Expressivities. Thus its realism was ultimately based on
capacity for expression.
The
expressionism, revealed in the most important paintings of
the second Spanish avant-garde movement, derives from its
closeness to reality. What is this reality? It is an
essentially the same as the one we find in Spanish
classical painting. It is reality born of a rough,
hand-to-mouth way of life, and a reality little concerned
with idealist mediatization. The realism of the Old
Masters was justified by its expressivities; the
expressionism of the avant-garde is justified by its
reality.
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