It has been forty years since my last visit to this Museum. I am happy to report that it remains exactly as I remember having seen it all those many years ago. Happy because it retains the old style museum presentation: there are wood and glass fronted vitrines stuffed with artifacts, the paintings and the decorative arts are mixed together, and throughout the exhibition area things all seem to be on top of one another. Almost everything is dimly lighted as if there has never been an awareness here of the history of modern light bulbs. I am all in favor of this kind of thing: the United States has more than enough of those bland, antiseptic display houses that pass for museums.
The museum sits just off Broadway with its back along 155th Street. An entrance at the Broadway side takes the visitor across a paved brick courtyard to the museum building. When it was originally built the entrance was from 156th Street and the museum property filled three quarters of the length of that long city block. The campus was divided into three long horizontal parts on the width of the block. The first was a set of stairs up from the street, the next was the open courtyard and the museum then occupied the last third of the width of the block. That would make the building approximately fifty feet deep by about one hundred fifty feet long. Later constructions on either side of the building were added for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Numismatic Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian. Those latter two have moved to the former U.S. Customs House at the foot of Broadway in Battery Park. Those buildings here are empty at present and it appears that all of this has been long forgotten by the powers that be. The area of the original stairway off the street was closed many years ago and The North Building was erected there. On the Museum web site the hours for this building are posted but it is never revealed what is on exhibit there: I believe it is used for special exhibits.
Built in 1908 the building is, as was the custom in those days, Beaux Arts Classic Revival. But the interior is Spanish Renaissance. It consists of an entry room with two small stairways on either side, some rooms further off to the sides, and then one passes into the main room which has the dimensions of the exterior of the building running to the visitor’s left and right. This room is open to the skylighted ceiling and there is on the second level a gallery all around the room. The whole of the interior is covered in unglazed molded, decorative terra cotte. Had I not been told that it was Spanish Renaissance I would have thought it was English so pronounced is the sense of Robert Adam and Grinling Gibbons. The main floor is covered with three inch hexagonal terra cotte tiles and they have that beautiful soft warmth of old tile that looks like leather.
Among the decorative items there are things here that one will not see in any other museum in the City, writing desks, cabinets, etc., and in marquetry that is truly exquisite. As might be expected of a catholic culture there are many beautiful religious pieces in gold, silver, and wood. There is also a superb collection of Spanish ceramics, or as it is sometimes called, Hispano Moresque ceramics. As I have fallen in love with ceramics these past few years I was thrilled to discover this. Having seen approximately 70 American museums in the last three years, each of which has a collection of ceramics of one or another nationality, I cannot name another one that has a Hispano Moresque collection the equal of this.
In the space on the main floor under the overhead galleries there are more decorative pieces and some of the paintings. Originally there were windows in the back wall but those have been closed and on the first floor those openings now hold mounted textiles…the Moorish pieces are dazzling!
Upstairs the walls are lined with the vitrines and above them the larger paintings. There are, on view during my visit, three Goya’s and three Velasquez’s. I believe there is also the work of Ribera, Zurbaran, and Murillo…I didn’t add that in my notes. There are three by El Greco which is interesting in that his work was not “rediscovered” until just about the time this museum was built.
I was first taken to this museum by a Colombian friend who was, if nothing else, a Spanish chauvinist. He had taken it upon himself to educate me in Spanish art, claiming that it was far superior to that of the Italian Renaissance. As a person educated in the American public school system, of course I would have found it almost impossible to agree with his bias.
However, in my museum travels the past few years I have been astounded by the richness and the majesty and the poetry of the paintings from the Spanish golden age that I have encountered: on this visit I wanted to retrace the original ground. While I greatly admire the Italian Renaissance works with their translucent and dazzling colors I have now fallen in love with the rich earth tones and the golden light of classic Spanish paintings. In no other school of painting do those depicted live so deliberately and so intensely. They all seem to have what the Spanish describe as solero, soul, and they have it to the nth degree.
Unfortunately, I did not find the paintings here to be of that kind. In fact they were rather more similar to the Italian school and so I can understand why I was not so terribly impressed those many years ago.
The most renowned painting in the collection is Goya’s The Duchess of Alba. This painting was from the artist’s personal collection and there is the ongoing dispute, were they are were they not lovers. Regardless of that it is a painting which shows the mastery of the artist with its black lace skirt over a black dress and the loose and dramatic brush work of a man well up on his craft. As in all of Goya’s work there is the evident love of painting and of humanity.
Recently I have been looking at the work of Velasquez trying to understand the basis for his acclaim. Last year in Boston, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I studied his portrait of Phillip IV and tried to decide why it would be considered a great painting. It is a life size figure dressed in black, similar to a painting of another man here. The ground is a suffused light. It is simple and straight forward but there cannot be any doubt that this man, standing quietly but high above us, is The King. Facing that painting from across the room there is a similar portrait of a woman of the court painted by another artist and she stands against a wall on a tile floor. She wears so much jewelry we know she has to be wealthy. Her black dress is a master work of intricate tailoring. In sum, the painting is overly busy; it has too much information. Turning again to the Velasquez I could understand that the King was the subject of an exercise in the art of understatement.
There is a similar Velasquez painting in this museum, Portrait of a Little Girl. It is a small painting and it hangs beside and near the bottom of the full sized figure of the man. This young girl wears a simple chemise, her hair is neatly combed, her gaze is relaxed and she sits quietly and obediently for the artist. She has given him her complete attention. In the course of his work the artist has captured her essence.
The portrait hangs on the east wall of the upstairs gallery. Turning your back to it and looking across the whole of the museum and seeing the paintings of the richly costumed royal personalities and the writhing saints and the theatrical drama of the great themes reenacted in oil on canvas, you turn back to it realizing that it is the only painting of its kind in this museum. Its power is in its simplicity. As it should be for a girl this age, she is humility, charm, and innocence personified. And so that is the key, for me, of Velasquez’ art: the tremendous power of the understatement, the tremendous power of purity and simplicity. In this life that is so rare that it is surely the greatest of the great themes.
This collection was the concept and the work of Archer Milton Huntington, (1870-1955.) In addition to being fascinated by collections within museums, I am also fascinated by those we acknowledge as connoisseurs: unless one knows his subject and has extremely fine discernment, a collection can be an embarrassment. In fact, there are examples in American museums of those who bought “everything” in order to cover their bets. Sad. Because the work here is so extraordinary, I think we should want to know more about Mr. Huntington and why a person would choose, at nineteen, to be a connoisseur rather than an artist.
Since its establishment, this museum has continued to acquisition artworks. The brochure claims 15,000 prints and 176,000 photographs, none of which are on view. This makes me wonder where those items are, why they are kept in storage, (for what purpose?), and to wonder if the museum has plans to expand their facilities. If so, I would think the two empty buildings on the campus would be the logical space. As they have been empty for many years, I also wonder if there might be something wrong with those buildings?
If the museum does expand I hope they will not conform to the prevailing norm and give us a nondescript “modern” museum with an exterior designer shell: I would much prefer to see someone with the courage to continue the Old Style: a living still life rich with textures and colors.
There was an unexpected bonus in my visit: a greater understanding of Picasso. We know that Picasso was a Spanish artist but he is so identified with the school of Paris that we sometimes forget that. This has to do as well with our own lack of knowledge regarding Spanish art. But having just read three volumes of the Richardson biography I know that when in Spain Picasso traveled extensively to see Spanish museums. In this museum I believe I can see what he might have seen there.
An artist well represented here, and one I do not care for, Sorolla, exemplifies for me the decadent end of the western tradition. Having mastered that tradition at the age of fourteen, I can imagine that Picasso might have had somewhat the same response to Sorolla’s work. He then asked himself, as an artist, where can I go, what can I do? There were abundant examples in Spanish art to show him the way forward.
For example: on a column behind The Duchess of Alba there is a small, six by nine inch, carved wood panel, Christ Bearing the Cross. The cross is on a diagonal across the top of the format, the figure is weighed down, the knees are bent, and the head rolls back. The body fills the format. The cross is across the shoulders but the right arm, supporting it, seems to rise out of the head. Anatomically it is wrong but compositionally it is right. On the column next over there is a depiction of one of the female saints. The folds of her skirt have the sharp accordion geometry of a folded paper fan. In both of these works we can see the human figure as expressive form just as Picasso used it. And we can also see in these details that there are similarities in works that Picasso made.
Under the overhead east gallery there are two marble tombs which were originally quite tall. In order to show the whole of them within this reduced space, they have been dismantled and the various components have been reassembled as an artwork within a new format. If Picasso had seen something like this in a Spanish museum it can be understood as one of the inspirations for cubism as well as his later work with its dislocations and reassignments.
But the strongest influence is in the ceramics. In particular, on one of the chargers, against a geometric Moorish ground, a cobalt blue line meanders until it returns to its starting point and concludes the silhouette of a bull. The head of that bull turns his face to look at us wide eyed with wonder. That painted line is pure Picasso…just as there is so much in this museum that calls him to mind. Yes, he is first and foremost a Spanish painter and if we do not recognize that the fault is ours. It is interesting that while an awareness of his presence is so constant here, there is not one of his works on view. Hispanic Society? Shame. Shame. Shame.
http://www.hispanicsociety.org/
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