The Beginnings of Modernity in Valencia

Spanish painting spent much of the nineteenth century searching for a voice. It found one — several, in fact — at the turn of the century, and nowhere more vividly than in Valencia.

Ask the Valencian artists of that generation who showed them the way and most would give the same answer: Francisco Domingo Marqués. It was Domingo Marqués who opened the door to the great renewal that followed — sculptors like Mariano Benlliure, painters like José Benlliure, Ignacio Pinazo, and Antonio Muñoz Degraín. None of them ever abandoned the figure. What changed was the touch. Seduced by the immediacy of the French Impressionists and the Italian Macchiaioli, they gave their canvases a fluidity and closeness Spanish painting had not known before — while keeping their compass fixed on the most unflinching realist Spain ever produced, Diego Velázquez.

Francisco Domingo Marqués. Autorretrato,1865. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

One of them carried this Valencian light farther than all the rest. Joaquín Sorolla Bastida became the most internationally celebrated painter the city ever gave the world.

Valencians knew, even as it was happening, that they were living through an exceptional chapter of their history. The triumphs abroad of Sorolla, of Benlliure, of the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez told them so. And Sorolla's gravitational pull at home was immense: painters like José Mongrell, Julio Vila Prades, and Víctor Moya Calvo worked in his orbit, and through them his manner shaped Valencian art deep into the twentieth century.

This was Valencia's silver age, and it built institutions as well as pictures. The campaign for a Palace of Fine Arts gathered real momentum after 1909 — the same year, not coincidentally, that Sorolla conquered New York. A rising generation — Antonio Fillol, José Segrelles, Manuel Benedito, Ramón Stolz, José Navarro Llorens — banded together in the Valencian Artistic Youth Association, determined to inherit the moment.

The story did not end in sunlight. As the century darkened, Spanish visual culture broke onto the international scene with harder-edged work: the uncompromising social criticism of Expressionists like Balbino Giner and Ángel Tébar, and the cool precision of New Objectivity in the hands of Rosario de Velasco and Horacio Ferrer de Morgado. The modernity that began with light on water ended somewhere far more troubled — but it began here, in Valencia.