NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History, a panoramic overview of the history of five centuries of Spanish art, on view through March 28, 2007. Approximately 140 paintings by Spanish masters, including El Greco, Diego Vel�zquez, Francisco de Zurbar�n, Jos� de Ribera, Bartolom� Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Goya, Juan Gris, Joan Mir�, Salvador Dal�, and Pablo Picasso, have been culled from private and public collections throughout Spain, Europe, and the U.S., in this first historical overview of Spanish painting to be seen in New York.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX). Support provided by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities. Media Partner Thirteen/WNET.

Unlike other overviews that display paintings in a strictly chronological order, Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History is presented in fifteen distinct sections, each based on a theme running through the past five centuries of Spanish culture. These thematic axes reveal the connections and affinities between the old masters and the modern era through a series of carefully chosen, content-based clusters, each based on a theme running through the past five centuries of Spanish culture. Accordingly, within each section of the exhibition works from different periods appear side by side, offering often radical juxtapositions that cut across time to reveal the overwhelming coherence of the Spanish tradition. As viewers move through the exhibition, these sections not only articulate the dominant trends of the Spanish School but reveal the Spanishness of great twentieth-century artists who lived abroad—Picasso, Gris, Mir�, and Dal�.

The fifteen sections of the exhibition are titled: Monks, Bodegones, Landscapes, The Domestic World, Women in Public, Weeping Women, Virgins and Mothers, Nudes, Childhood, Monstruos, Knights and Ghosts, Ladies, Crucifixions, The Fallen, and Flyers. Filling the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and several of the museum’s tower galleries, the sections are comprised of numerous works from European and North American lenders and over 65 paintings from museums and private collections in Spain, including 15 major works from Museo Nacional del Prado and 10 works from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof�a in Madrid. Especially significant works in the exhibition include: Francisco de Zurbar�n’s magnificent Saint Hugh in the Refectory (ca. 1655) in a rare appearance outside of Spain, Juan S�nchez Cot�n’s Still Life with Cardoon and Parsnips (ca. 1604), Joan Mir�’s The Table (Still Life with Rabbit) (1920–21), El Greco’s The Vision of St. John (ca. 1608–14), Bartolom� Esteban Murillo’s The Virgin of the Rosary (ca. 1650–55), Salvador Dal�’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, One Second before Awakening (1944), Francisco de Goya’s The Duchess of Alba (1797), Jos� de Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas (1637), as well as nearly 35 works by Picasso, including his important Portrait of Jaime Sabartes (1939) and The Infanta Margarita Mar�a from The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas), after Vel�zquez (1957).

Until recently, art historians bracketed Spanish painting between El Greco and Goya, maintaining that twentieth-century, avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism—both of which were pioneered by artists of Spanish origin—broke completely with the traditions that preceded them. Today we have sufficient historical perspective to see that, despite their revolutionary aesthetic leaps, the great artists of the early twentieth century were nourished by traditional models that were, furthermore, local in character. These models found their source in the Spanish School of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an era commonly regarded as the Golden Age of Spanish painting. The aesthetic styles developed during these years—from the visionary opulence of El Greco to the intimate naturalism of Vel�zquez—dominated artistic production in Spain throughout the following two-and-a-half centuries, as the nation’s imperial power declined and Spain became increasingly isolated internationally. Even Goya, arguably the greatest Spanish painter of the nineteenth century, could break free from his forerunners only by facing them square in the eye: as the French romantic poet Th�ophile Gautier observed, “in his desire for artistic innovation, Goya found himself confronted by the old Spain.”

By the late nineteenth century, following Goya and the spirit of romanticism, a national critical conscience had awoken in Spain’s artists and intellectuals, but the country’s antiquated political, social, and economic structures largely thwarted this modernizing impulse. Accordingly there began a long period of exile or simple emigration, which marked the careers of all the twentieth-century masters exhibited here. During this time many stereotypical treatments that had formed in the wake of Spain’s Golden Age were cast in a new light, as Europe rediscovered the art of the Spanish School and began to write its history for the first time. Chief among these was Spain’s resolute anticlassicism, which was reflected in its timeless customs, its culture, and its art, and which came to be seen as a source of resistance to the overwhelming homogeneity associated with an industrialized, modern world. Thus as Spanish artists stigmatized the ideological clich�s of traditional Spain, they also realized that formal innovation could only come if these same aesthetic values were brought up to date. It is this endless return and reappropriation on a formal and iconographic level that binds together the works of Spanish artists, from Picasso, reaching back through Goya, to the masters of the Golden Age.

The origins of each of the exhibition’s themes lie in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, which was itself heavily influenced by the Counter-Reformation. This religious impulse sets the tone for many of the works in the exhibition, even in a genre as apparently worldly as the still life, which are featured in the largest section of the exhibition, Bodegones. A uniquely Spanish term for still life, bodeg�n refers to the pantries, or bodegas, where the pictured objects were kept. Early examples by artists like Juan S�nchez Cot�n and Francisco de Zurbar�n feature humble objects inscribed with transcendental values but depicted with the utmost naturalism against an inky black background that alludes to the void beyond worldly concerns. The fruits, vegetables, and other perishables in many of these paintings evoke a sense of transience even as they are precisely arranged along rigid sills, implying the timelessness of mathematical law. Over 300 years later, this “mineral” quality would serve as an important precedent for the Cubists, in particular the fragmented style of Juan Gris. In his canvases, as in much of Picasso’s early work, the transcendent geometries of the seventeenth century take on a modern, wholly unreligious character, updated to a new cultural moment but still constituting an inescapable historical model.

In the section titled “Childhood” the exhibition examines typical representations of children over the past five centuries. Until the late eighteenth century, Spanish society distanced itself intellectually and emotionally from the notion of childhood, due largely to the high rate of infant mortality and prejudicial views that childhood was dangerously close to original sin and brute nature. Thus, when portraying children, usually for heraldic reasons, painters tended to exaggerate potential adult features to the point of caricature.