Ignacio Zuloaga: The Other Face of the Spanish Modernist Coin

Just yesterday morning, at the information desk of the Museo de Bellas Artes, in Valencia, I asked, to the polite bewilderment of the staff, about the work of Ignacio Zuloaga. The name sounded familiar, they said, but the museum held nothing of his.

Then I reached the third floor, and there he was. Three canvases — one of them displayed with particular prominence. The academy, it seems, had granted its recognition; the popular consensus still denied the existence of that other painter. Of that other Spain.

I came to Zuloaga through Sorolla, and I now believe you cannot fully understand the second without understanding the first. Two faces of the same Spanish coin.

I've just read an article by Gonzalo Prieto — not an art critic but a geographer by vocation, and perhaps for that very reason his observations sidestep the commonplaces of the genre. Prieto reads Zuloaga's canvases as maps of what Spaniards now call la España vacía — the emptying Spain of the interior, between the coast and the capital — and finds that Zuloaga had already charted it more than a century ago.

There it is in Mis primas, where behind the figures stretches a desolate comarca without a single tree; in El enano Gregorio el botero, where the walls of Ávila are reduced to a backdrop for that unsettling figure; in Gregorio en Sepúlveda and Mujeres en Sepúlveda, where the landscape stops being scenery and claims equal billing with the people in it — the crooked streets and huddled houses of a medieval town adrift on a harsh terrain of ravines and hills. Cracked old houses, worn stone facades, towns detained in time: the wounds of history, painted as landscape.

Mujeres en Sepúlveda. Ignacio Zuloaga. Éibar, Guipúzcoa, España, 1870 – Madrid, España, 1945

Mis primas. Ignacio Zuloaga. 1870-1945.

Paisaje de Pancorbo. Ignacio Zuloaga. Espacio cultural Ignacio Zuloaga, Zumaia, Guipúzcoa.

Zuloaga drove his automobile across Castile, La Rioja, and Navarre, photo camera at hand, collecting what he called "the impression or the emotion" of the road — those vast panoramas that appear suddenly as you crest a mountain pass, or burst open after the violent curve of a gorge, the way Paisaje de Pancorbo bursts open. Isn't that precisely how we see the land today — how we grew up looking at the world? We are no longer shepherds or pilgrims walking down into a valley; we perceive the landscape from the autobahn, at speed, through glass. This shift is crucial, fundamental, and Zuloaga appears to have been among the pioneers of that way of seeing. I found that idea rewarding.

What fascinates me most in Prieto's article is the idea that Zuloaga painted the Spanish landscape from the perspective of the motorist.

And there was a discovery waiting for me in Prieto's pages: among the landscapes he discusses is Zuloaga's view of Graus, with the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de la Peña — a painting held, of all places, by the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia. It may well have been hanging a few steps from that information desk where the name drew only a puzzled smile.

The irony, of course, is old. As Prieto recounts, the Spanish government rejected Zuloaga's Víspera de la corrida for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, judging that it perpetuated "a stereotyped and backward image of Spain." Brussels exhibited it that same year, and the Belgian government bought it. Zuloaga triumphed across Europe and was disowned at home — a casualty, his whole life, of a debate about the image of Spain. The scene at the museum desk yesterday was that same debate, still murmuring, a century and a quarter later.

I came to Valencia looking for more Sorolla. What I also found in that path was the other face of the Spanish coin: Zuloaga, where the light is dim and the feeling is one of loss — the loss experienced and expressed by the Generation of '98, the generation of Unamuno. Sorolla and Zuloaga stand on either side of the fault line that cracked Spain open after the Spanish–American War. One painted the country's hope; the other, its wound. It turns out you need both to see Spain whole.

And the fault line did not close. A generation later it opened into a trench: the Civil War split Spain along much the same seam, and this time the two Spains did not compete in exhibition halls — they met on the battlefield. In Buenos Aires, where I grew up, I heard the Republican refugees sing about it. The song was El gallo negro, and for decades it passed from mouth to mouth as anonymous folklore; only much later did the world learn it had been written by José Antonio "Chicho" Sánchez Ferlosio and recorded namelessly in 1963, on a clandestine record of the anti-Franco resistance. Anonymity was its protection, and its power.

Two roosters meet in the fighting pit — one red, one black:

Cuando canta el gallo negro es que ya se acaba el día. Si cantara el gallo rojo, otro gallo cantaría.

When the black rooster crows, the day is dying. If the red rooster were to crow, it would be another song entirely.

The allegory asks little decoding and forgives none. The black rooster is the Spain that won the war — the Spain of shadow, censorship, and mourning dress, crowing loudest precisely because it had silenced the other. The red rooster is the defeated Republic, beaten but, as the song warns, never surrendered: no se rinde un gallo rojo más que cuando está ya muerto — a red rooster only surrenders when it is already dead. And the refrain turns on a Spanish idiom: otro gallo cantaría, literally "another rooster would crow," meaning how different things would be. If the red rooster could be heard, Spain would be another country.

It is not, in truth, a rivalry at all, but a contrast far older than either painter, embedded deep in the cultural mosaic of Iberia. It did not begin in the museums and it did not end in the war. Sorolla and Zuloaga simply gave it pigment and canvas; the refugees in Buenos Aires gave it a melody.