4 days ago
Picasso or Goya: who created Spain's most important painting?
The Regency artist Sir Thomas Lawrence deemed Velázquez's Las Meninas to represent 'the true philosophy of the art' of painting.
A spirited public debate about who created the most important Spanish painting, however, has pitted Goya against Picasso, contrasting two visions of the country.
The debate started when Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the combative bestselling novelist, challenged the assertion made by Miguel Ángel Cajigal, an art critic, that Picasso's Guernica was Spain's most significant work.
Cajigal, who made the declaration during a radio broadcast, supports the broadly-held consensus that Picasso's 1937 work, which depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, is the most internationally acclaimed owing to its status as the world's most powerful anti-war painting.
But Perez-Reverte, a former war correspondent and creator of the swashbuckling Captain Alatriste series of novels, strongly disagreed, stating on social media that the claim 'had left me in shock'.
He then posted an image of Goya's Duel with Cudgels, an 1820s work in which two men, up to their knees in mud, club each other.
'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, prompting a long riposte from Cajigal and thousands of comments from the public, as well as media headlines about the ensuing public debate about national art.
The novelist's characterisation of Duel with Cudgels echoes the description of it as 'symbolically embodying the irrationality of fratricidal violence' by Madrid's Prado Museum, where it is housed.
The work has been judged as presaging the civil war of 1936 to 1939 and in recent years it has been used as an allegory for Spain's deeply polarised politics, which appears increasingly coarse and senseless.
The museum interprets it as an allegory of Spain's internal conflict during the restoration under Ferdinand VII, a vivid portrayal of internal divisions. The mural paintings were among those that decorated the house known as Quinta del Sordo, where Goya lived and have come to be known as the Black Paintings, in part because of their sombre subject matter.
X-rays have shown that the two fighters were not originally sunk into the ground up to their knees but stood on a grassy meadow.
'It's Spanish to the hilt,' stated Pérez-Reverte. Some Spaniards agreed with him and many argued for works by Velázquez, Sorolla and El Greco. But others backed Cajigal, with one commenting: 'It's amazing for its technique, the symbolism of the figures and colour as well as for what it represents as a story. No one is going to deny that.'
The art critic pointed out that the image of Guernica adorns the UN headquarters in New York and its pre-eminent importance is underscored by numerous prestigious scholars. 'I have been teaching Spanish art classes to students from the United States for almost 20 years,' he said. 'The only painting they always know is Guernica. And then, Goya and El Greco.'
Picasso's masterpiece, inspired by the devastating 1937 air raid by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion on Guernica at the behest of General Franco, was first shown at the world fair in Paris the same year. Picasso had been commissioned by the Republican government to produce a work to boost awareness of the war and raise funds.
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When the Second World War broke out he decided that the painting should remain in New York for safekeeping. In 1958 he extended the loan for an indefinite period, until such time as democracy had been restored in Spain. It arrived home in 1981.
The debate about which painting best defines Spain has divided broadly into those that view Guernica as the painting of a modern democratic Spain that once lived under dictatorship, and those that deem Goya's work to be no less tragic, a self‑portrait of country mired in its own history.
A social media user commented: 'Guernica speaks to the world; but Goya shows what Spain inflicts on itself.'
