Vision of Spain: In Documentary Mode
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There is a room inside the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a story that America never fully heard. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain. Fishermen pulling nets from the sea, pilgrims on their knees, a Valencian garden flooded with life. Women of Aragon, of the Basque country — their expressions carrying the quiet dignity of folks who know who they are. These are Joaquín Sorolla's Vision of Spain.
I keep thinking about a documentary that would walk pass the frames as if stepping through a door, then emerge on the other side in present-day Spain. Not the Camino de Santiago, not the running of the bulls, not the topless beaches of the Costa Brava. Sorolla's Spain. The one that he gifted America — the one that remains, just as misunderstood, just as invisible to us today as it was then when Sorolla painted these panels between 1913 and 1919
The Wound That Made the Paintings
The Spanish-American War lasted less than four months. When it ended, Spain had lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam — the last remnants of an empire that had once stretched across half the world. For a nation that had spent five centuries defining itself through its colonial reach, the humiliation was total. El Desastre, Spaniards called it. The Disaster. That was the context that preceeded the "gift" of these vignettes. The defeated constelation of Iberian cultures was revealing itself in canvas. That was more than a gesture, it was art meeting the occasion.
William Randolph Hearst's newspapers had spent months before the war constructing an image of Spain as a medieval — cruel, backward, tyrannical, bleeding Cuba dry. The yellow press made Spain into a monster, and when the war came and the monster was defeated, America felt righteous. Few Americans paused to ask what Spain actually was, beyond the cartoon empire it had just dismembered.
The Spanish writers and intellectuals who came of age in that moment — the Generation of '98, they would later be called — turned defeat into a soul searching journey in a time when Sigmond Freud was spreading to the four winds the idea of carried in the interpretation of dreams. Europe was changing, Spain was about to be reborn.
What is Spain, really? What survives the empire? Miguel de Unamuno walked Castile looking for something ancient and true. Antonio Machado wrote in verse about roads and dust and the slow dignified endurance of the Spanish countryside. They were trying to locate the soul of something that had just been publicly shamed on the world stage.
Archer Huntington's Bet
The commission came from Archer Milton Huntington, the son of a railroad baron who had become, improbably and magnificently, the foremost American patron of Hispanic culture. He had founded the Hispanic Society of America in 1904, in a Beaux-Arts building on Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights, with the stated mission of making the art and culture of Spain and Latin America visible.
Huntington knew that the image of Spain in American popular culture was wrong. He believed Sorolla, already the most celebrated painter of his generation, could do what journalism could not: make Americans feel Spain rather than judge it.
The assignment Huntington gave was staggering in its ambition: travel to every region of Spain, live among the people, and paint them at a scale that would fill an entire library. Sorolla spent years doing exactly that — painting en plein air, in the actual locations, the actual light, with actual people from those villages and coasts and plains standing in front of him. By 1917 he admitted in a letter that he was exhausted to the bone. He finished the final panel in 1919. By 1923 he was dead, felled by a stroke. In a sense, they are the artist testament.
Fourteen Doors
Each chapter begins in the painted world of 1913 — the oxen-drawn carts of Castile, the sardine fishermen of Ayamonte with their wet arms and their nets, the Sevillian women in the courtyard of a house that smells of orange blossom — and then, with whatever grammar of cinema makes the passage feel like dreaming rather than cutting, we are there. In Galicia. In Extremadura. In the market towns of Aragon.
The Spain that Sorolla was trying to portray still exists. The dehesa — that vast, haunting landscape of cork oak and holm oak in Extremadura where pigs still wander under ancient trees and the silence is absolute. The fishing villages of the Basque coast where the Atlantic comes in hard and grey. Castile profunda, where villages have been quietly emptying for decades, where the old carry still a way of life in their bodies that will vanish when they do. The Holy Week processions of Andalusia — not the famous ones in Seville that the cameras attend, but the small-town ones in the sierra where the penitents walk barefoot on cobblestones at midnight and the darkness is complete except for the candles.
Sorolla painted biblical vignettes, essentially. He painted nations rooted, devout, labor-shaped — a Spain that preceded and outlasted the empire. He was making an argument: that Spain is not what you think it is. That it is older and quieter and more various and more human than the cartoon villain American newspapers depicted.
Beyond the Obvious
Today Spain seems to suffer from a different set of preconceptions than the ones Sorolla was facing, but misreadings nonetheless.
The Spain we encounter at first glace seems a greatest-hits compilation: Gaudí, Picasso, Real Madrid, flamenco, paella, cheap flights to Mallorca. The Camino has become a self-help pilgrimage for Northern Europeans processing divorces and career crises. The coastal Spain of beach resorts — mass tourism as an industrial operation, the same parasols from Torremolinos to Benidorm. Even the more sophisticated tourist's Spain tends to reduce the country to its most photogenic exports: the Alhambra, the Prado, the pintxos bars of San Sebastián.
What gets missed is the nation Sorolla felt his own — and the country that, in different form, persists. A nation that contains within itself a half-dozen distinct civilizations, languages still spoken by millions, landscapes of almost terrifying variety. A country that was the Muslim world's greatest medieval intellectual center and then was not. A country that skipped the Industrial Revolution and went almost directly from agrarian feudalism to a second attempt to built a Republic, to Fascism, to a more recent attempt to built democratic society while dealing with a constant strugle ato built a national cultural identity in the face of strong regionalisms. A mosaic of sorts, an extraordinary quilt of idioms and traditions.
A country, in short, that is as complex and contradictory and unconfined as any — and that remains, in the Anglo-American imagination, a place you go to retire, eat well and get a tan.
Sorolla understood that the antidote to caricature is specificity. Not argument, not explanation — the specific face, the specific light on the specific water at the specific hour. You cannot keep thinking a cartoon when you have been made to see a person. That is what his murals do.
The Magnum Opus Problem
There is another layer to this that I find myself unable to set aside. Sorolla knew, while he was making them, that the murals were his largest work. The scale alone — fourteen panels, two hundred and thirty feet of canvas, years of his life — announced that intention. He was painting his masterpiece, and he knew it.
A documentary built around that ambition would inevitably become a film about ambition — about the particular madness of deciding that this, whatever this is, will be the thing you are remembered for. Sorolla traveled to regions of Spain he had never seen, painting in conditions that were sometimes brutal, living away from his family for months at a time, all in service of a space in New York.
I think about that when I think about what it would mean to make a film about his experience — to actually go to Ayamonte and Galicia and Extremadura and the Basque coast, to find the people who are the living descendants of those portrayed in the murals at the Hispanic Society of America, to sit with them long enough that the camera stops being an intrusion and becomes a witness.
The Sorolla Room at the Hispanic Society of America is located at 613 W 155th Street, New York. Admission is free. Sign-up and subscribe to The Journal for more articles like this.
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