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The typically athletically-built nude is present in the exhibition in works such as La Arquera, showing a female archer. Salvador Salas
Thyssen museum in Malaga revives the nude in Spanish art: A national allergy to undressing
Art and culture

Thyssen museum in Malaga revives the nude in Spanish art: A national allergy to undressing

This temporary exhibition includes everything from primitive works by Picasso to the portrait of the cinema diva Raquel Meller and much more will be 'on show' until March 2025 at the Palacio de Villalón

Francisco Griñán

Malaga

Friday, 11 October 2024, 13:32

Nudity only takes place in private. This was the maxim in Spain in the late 19th and 20th centuries, a country clinging to its Catholic tradition and little accustomed to undressing in public. Art was the exception, especially in the academic sphere for the training of artists in anatomical portraiture. Even so, this branch of art was reserved solely for male artists because female artists were forbidden to venture there. Still, those same artists - both men and women - were the ones who defied this moral code in the name of creative freedom. They also progressed from realist iconography to the symbolic iconography brought about by modernity and the avant-garde. They explored the nakedness of the nude. This is what is portrayed in the new, major, temporary exhibition at the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga. The exhibition opens with a painting showing some striking male bodies signed by a certain Pablo Ruiz before he started adding the maternal surname of Picasso to all his work. The museum also regales the legend of Julio Romero de Torres’s portrait of Venus, in which he used the face of the great international silent film star Raquel Meller, (and some would suggest he used the rest of her body as well).

A century of nude art being out in the open and going against the tide in Spain is what the exhibition is all about. Entitled Desnudos. Cuerpos Normativos e Insurrectos en el Arte Español (1870-1970) the collection on show is very much about how nudes were traditionally, classically depicted and then how that moved on to be far more rebellious. Even the timeline is a little out of kilter as the last work, in chronological order, dates to 1976 when political change was in the air in Spain with the transition to democracy, represented by a large-scale lithograph by Joan Miró showing his artistic freedom from any physical demands to represent the human figure with any accuracy, instead just painting recognisable patches of colour. “We are looking at one of the great themes of world art that did not have a favourable trend in Spain, a country influenced by the Church, although paradoxically, of the ten most important nudes ever painted in history, three are by Spanish artists,” explained Lourdes Moreno, artistic director of the Carmen Thyssen, at Monday’s opening presentation for the new temporary exhibition, now running at the Palacio de Villalón until 9 March 2025.

Dios de la Fruta, a work by Gabriel Morcillo in the exhibition. Salvador Salas

Moreno was quick to mention this trinity of natural masterpieces with a Hispanic background: La Venus del Espejo by Velázquez, La Maja Desnuda by Goya, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso from 1907. “We wanted all three to be indirectly present in the exhibition,” she said. She went on to mention the female nude painted in homage to Velázquez by Granada-born Aurelia Navarro (Desnudo de Mujer (1908)), which was a defiant act of sensuality that was forbidden to female artists at the time. There is also a great work by Dalí that does not look like a Dalí, a tribute to the genius of Picasso is acknowledged in Dali’s version of his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1970).

It was precisely that original and groundbreaking work by the Malaga-born artist in 1907 that “destroyed the academic concept of the nude as order, harmony and beauty, according to the Greek canons”, thus opening a new door in art through which 20th-century artists moved away from eroticism in search of the schematic and the symbolic as a mirror of the soul. “Instead of the human body, what they seek through their work is to uncover what’s inside,” explained Lourdes Moreno.

The whole exhibition has been produced in-house, curated by Alberto Gil and Bárbara García Menéndez, and is displaying 86 works of art from 45 different museums and private collections.

A formidable collection on loan

This high number of loans “is something that the visitor is unaware of, but it is the sheer enormity of it that joins the artistic discourse brought together by this exhibition and what all that brings to the world of Spanish art,” stated Guillermo Cervera, general curator of the Carmen Thyssen art collection. He was accompanied at the presentation event for the exhibition by Mariana Pineda, the councillor in charge of culture for Malaga city. She emphasised the “precision” needed to present this exhibition, including the presence of works of art on loan from the Reina Sofía, the Chillida Leku museum, the fine arts city museums of Granada and Bilbao, the San Fernando academy in Madrid, the Sorolla museum and the Picasso museum in Barcelona, among others. Also the Caixa foundation’s loan of a magnificent work by Anglada-Camarasa called Sibila as well as its sponsorship of the exhibition through its own cultural institution and Caixabank.

The selection shows this transition from the eroticism seen in a nude to regarding the naked body as a representation of sensations and feelings. This is a journey that goes from the classicism of the first Picasso, Rusiñol and Sorolla to the first breaks with tradition such as Fortuny’s old men, which clearly marks this departure from the canons of classical beauty and the usual, athletically-built bodies. This break with tradition is also present in Venus de la Poesía (1913), the apparently classical work by Romero de Torres, but which does not portray a goddess but rather a woman, the great silent film diva Raquel Meller, who filmed the great international cinema production of Carmen (1924) in Ronda. This oil painting was not even exhibited in public until a couple of decades ago and it now features in this exhibition.

Nudes in sculpture, drawing and photography are also scattered across this ambitious exhibition at the Palacio de Villalón museum, which shows the predominance of the female form portrayed as a nude in art. “The artists have been mostly men,” explained Moreno. Nevertheless, this collection also exhibits the great tradition of the male nude form, albeit much more classically represented. For this reason the piece by Gabriel Morcillo, Dios de la Fruta (1936), as a vindication of the male body loaded with gastronomic symbolism, especially stands out.

In contrast, the work from the same year by Zuloaga, Retrato de La Oterito en su Camerino, is a truly classic nude of the copla-singer and dancer Eulalia Franco partially undressed and proudly displaying all her physical splendour.

“This exhibition is a song of freedom and that is what the artists we have brought together are telling us,” concluded the artistic director. A naked journey from the typical, prescriptive nude to the insurrectionary spirit of an art that rebelled against a whole country that treated nudity as a sin, a taboo.

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