Murillo, not so saintly: A quiet master reassessed
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Sunday, November 24, 2024


Murillo, not so saintly: A quiet master reassessed
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Marriage Feast at Cana, c. 1672. Oil on canvas © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.

by Walker Mimms



FORT WORTH, TX.- In the twilight of Spain’s Golden Age, in the 1660s and ’70s, the great Diego Velázquez had gone, and it was Bartolomé Esteban Murillo who reigned. When his work arrived on loan in 1830, the people of Boston fawned.

In our Cynical Age, however, Murillo has lost some favor. His specialty is devotional imagery — saints and cherubs and Virgins. His principal mode is charm. His brushwork is tactfully loose but never risky. We could blame it on secular modern life, but Velázquez’s cold dissections of courtly power and his vigorous action painting have proven much more popular.

A long-overdue reassessment has arrived at the Kimbell Art Museum here. The painter’s largest show in America in 20 years, “Murillo: From Heaven to Earth,” curated by Guillaume Kientz, formerly of the Louvre and now director of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, puts the spotlight on 54 paintings and sketches in a decidedly secular vein (and four paintings by relevant contemporaries). Until now, Murillo’s interest in class stratification was not seen to be so central to his work. For a painter “known primarily for his religious paintings,” as Kientz understates it in the catalog, these genre scenes, portraits and narratives reveal Murillo’s surprisingly social concerns.

Born in 1617 and orphaned by 10, Murillo properly left his native Seville, Spain’s port to the New World, only once. He saw Madrid for a few months in his 40s. No Grand Tour, no Italy, no tenure at court. This was rare for a painter of his stature. His commissions were dominated by regional charities, merchants and churches. Critics have always wondered, with some condescension, how he developed such a sure-footed style in his Andalusian isolation.

Poverty and charity were Murillo’s big concerns. He depicted them with the zeal of an Inquisitor and a helping of melodrama. In “San Diego de Alcala Feeding the Poor” (circa 1646), an inventive reworking of the Nativity with a cauldron of soup where baby Jesus should be, a starving mother’s breast spills from her ragged blouse. In Murillo’s “Prodigal Son” cycle, as the hero runs out of money and into disgrace, his silk doublet and finely paned sleeves disintegrate before our eyes. Far from biblical, he is a Golden Age aristocrat. By the climax, the dark “Prodigal Son Among the Swine” (1650-55), the boy is bare-chested, boots shredded to sandal.

Clothes crumble, again, in Murillo’s portraits of giggling street urchins. A gallery of these tall canvases steals the show. While a boy reclines with a ballgame in “Invitation to a Game of Argolla” (circa 1665-70), a younger child in torn-up shoes, bread crammed into his open mouth, stares on with classic toddler’s indecision. Will he give in to the fun, as a duo of bad boys have done in the next canvas over, in “Boys Playing Dice” (circa 1675-80)? Or will he feed himself?

In “Young Beggar” (circa 1648), a work of formal brilliance on loan from the Louvre, a barefoot boy crumples in the corner of a dark room, and a single window illuminates his dirty feet and some crustacean shells on the floor. At least one scholar has identified the shells as dead scorpions — a symbol of “evil defeated” — but they might just as well be shrimp shells, the remains of a humble Seville meal. Indeed, the classical reading of Murillo’s orphans as illustrations of moral imperatives has obstructed a simpler social context, one the Kimbell exhibition brings back to light.

Plague struck Seville in 1647, when Murillo’s career was just blossoming. It halved the population. Famines followed in the ’50s. Then bread riots. Another plague in the ’70s. In 1680, an earthquake. All the while, the Guadalquivir River, which allowed ships into Seville, began to silt up, forcing trade southward to the coastal town of Cádiz.




These little parables of precarity, with their dull earth tones and barren landscapes, reflect the motherless, scorched-earth quality of Seville in decline. But where Goya would turn savage over Spain’s fortunes, Murillo stayed light, even cutesy. He had to sell, after all. Somewhere between Jacob Riis and Charlie Chaplin, Murillo offers a knowing but escapist prance through need.

Strangest of all is the Kimbell’s own “Four Figures on a Step” (circa 1658-60). We are asked, forced really, to stare through a little boy’s torn pants into the bare cleft of his bottom. (When the Kimbell acquired the canvas in 1984, the pants had been painted shut. Following X-radiography, conservators restored it.) At left, adolescents ridicule the child. At right, a woman cradles his head, delousing him. All eyes are on us. The painting has raised questions and eyebrows, but Kientz is more sensible. In the catalog, he argues that the viewer of this painting, like the hungry orphan tempted by a ballgame, “is given a sort of moral choice” between wrong and right. Laugh at the boy, as the teens do, or melt with the kindly woman.

I took a different view of the painting. What this weird ensnarement depicts, to my mind, is the impulse to pry into desperation. All the ruined clothing and bared flesh in this show suggests the painter was very aware (I hesitate to say cynical) about the emotional-industrial complex that kept the Catholic Church profitable. Suffering heightened sympathy. Sympathy encouraged charity. Charity got you into Heaven.

Although there is plenty of “Earth” on loan here, what about the “Heaven,” the better-known half of Murillo’s career? Murillo painted dozens of Virgins, overdoses of sweetness and palette. Down the road in Dallas, the staircase of the Meadows Museum is dominated by his desserty “Immaculate Conception” of the 1650s, where cherubs and clouds bear Mary softly into the stratosphere. Away from the Kimbell’s grungier Murillo, his celestial paintings still await their reassessment. That might truly revolutionize our understanding of this quiet, slightly didactic master.

Instead, this exhibition inspires us to look elsewhere. I’m thinking of Murillo’s “Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine” (1680-82) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a canvas absent from the Kimbell show. Catherine was martyred on the wheel when she refused to recant her Christian faith. In Murillo’s telling, as she greets Mary and the Christ child, Catherine’s cortege of angels dissolves into a billowing meringue of vapor. Incompletion adds to the mystique, surely, as Murillo fell from a scaffolding while at work on this canvas and died shortly after. He had intended it for a convent in Cádiz, where all the port jobs were escaping from his hungry hometown.

It might now be seen as an elegy to old Seville. These unfinished angels grow a little clearer and a little more poetic in the light of Murillo’s reassessment in Texas.



‘Murillo: From Heaven to Earth’

Through Jan. 29, Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, Texas, 817-332-8451; kimbellart.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

January 17, 2023

Lark Mason presents a series of multiple sales emphasizing pattern and design

Gina Lollobrigida, movie star and sex symbol, is dead at 95

Pace presents an exhibition of new and recent work by Tara Donovan

Exhibition of new paintings by Jim Shaw opens at Gagosian Beverly Hills

Alioune Diagne unveils fifteen large-scale canvases at Galerie Templon's Brussels space

Murillo, not so saintly: A quiet master reassessed

Hauser & Wirth Zurich presents David Smith's exhibition 'Four Sculptures'

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery extends Albano Hernández exhibition 'Bah! Forraje!' until February 4th

Record 10 lots exceed $1 million each, leading Heritage FUN Auctions beyond $88 million

Currier Museum of Art welcomes Lorenzo Fusi as Chief Curator

Ruth Adler Schnee, exuberant designer of Modernist textiles, dies at 99

Green Vault jewels will not be exhibited until court case ends - Free State of Saxony seeks additional civil action

Catherine Southon to sell the archive of important Quaker Samuel Starbuck

Galerie Miranda presents 'Undergarments & Armor' by NYC-based artist Tanya Marcuse

De Appel Amsterdam presents Pope.L's 'Togetherness'

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, welcomes new Deputy Director Alex Bortolot

'Here Lies Love,' an Imelda Marcos disco musical, will play Broadway

Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome presents 'readymades belong to everyone ® Philippe Thomas declines his identity'

Iradj Moini and Judith Leiber are among the highlights of Moran's Costume Jewelry & Luxury Accessories Online sale

Cutaway model of a 1962 Vickers VC-10 BOAC jet airplane expected to soar in Miller & Miller's online auction

Richmond Art Center presents 'The Remembrance Project' as part of their winter exhibition schedule

Exhibition showcases more than a century of African studio portraits

Morgan Lehman opens an exhibition of new photogram collages by Wendy Small

How To Pick the Best Online Poker Site? Find Out Here!

Free Spins No Deposit-Everything You Should Know!

Tips for Choosing an Online Sportsbook

Fashioned for Re-use: Deborah Carter's Upcycled Apparel at The Wit Gallery

Tourmaline Gemstone Beads - A Buyers Guide

An Introduction to Aquamarine

Trendy Ways To Fill Up Your Free Time




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful