Spain’s Museum of Abstract Art Comes to Texas

I love visiting Texas. I love Vermont, of course, but as a citadel of freedom and opportunity, well, that’s not Vermont’s calling card, alas. Freedom and opportunity define Texas, as do oil, cattle, civic pride, and, in the last 20 or 30 years, high culture. Texas has some wonderful museums.

I gave two lectures in the Big D. One was at the Meadows Museum, the academic art museum at Southern Methodist University. It’s one of my favorite museums, with an all-Spanish collection of the very highest quality and a reliably inventive, intelligent exhibition program.

The memorial service in 2020 for Mark Roglán, the museum’s longtime director and a good friend, was the last time I visited the Meadows. Mark was an art impresario and scholar much admired here and in Spain. It’s always good to be in Texas and at the Meadows, but I wanted especially to see In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art. It’s a brilliant exhibition — good art, a new topic, succinct interpretation, and blather-free. The Meadows has lost none of its mojo.

The Museum of Spanish Abstract Art is in Cuenca, a town near Madrid best known to foreigners for its cliff-clinging houses with hanging gardens. Art people know it for what Alfred Barr, MoMA’s founding director, called “the most beautiful small museum in the world,” beautiful for its location and for the quality of its collection of bleeding-edge abstract painting and sculpture. The museum is closed for a renovation.

The Meadows, forever entrepreneurial, nabbed some of the Spanish museum’s best things for a first-ever U.S. visit. Both the exhibition and the book are collaborations between the Meadows and the Juan March Foundation, one of Madrid’s finest places for modern culture. Among other distinguished activities, it runs the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art. And the foundation’s director, Manuel Fontan del Junco, is himself an art impresario as well as a fine scholar. It’s no surprise the Meadows and the foundation are partnering on this revelatory project.

The first two galleries present the key players and themes. Eduardo Chillida’s Rough Chant IV, from the early ’60s, is a wood sculpture that looks like a Neolithic totem or something that’s grown from a dry Spanish plateau. Antonio Tàpies’s Brown and Ocher, from 1959, is made from marble fragments and pigments. It’s a flat variation of Chillida’s sculpture. Earth colors, haphazard scrapes, and the texture of stone suggest an old wall or a mountain in the desert. Fernando Zóbel’s The River, from 1976, is minimalist and ethereal.

Abstract art and Franco’s Spain seem so antithetical that they might very well exist on different planets, yet the museum in Cuenca happened on the crypto-fascist watch of a diminutive dictator. Spain was known as a cultural zombie during the Franco era, but people overstate how much of a zombie it was.

The catalogue is informative on this point. Yes, the visual culture was resolutely conservative, but abstract painters such as Chillida, Gustavo Torner, and Luis Feito were known commodities in Spain during the ’50s and ’60s. Spain didn’t join the United Nations until 1955, and by that point Franco’s regime had not only allied with the United States but promoted Spain for tourism. Abstract artists established influential collectives in Spain in the late ’40s and ’50s. They just couldn’t be political. There were no venues to display contemporary art in Spain, and also no art infrastructure of dealers and critics — this hobbled not only the avant-garde but art history in Spain generally. The Prado, after all, was a tomb, too.

Still, the museum was a bit of an under-the-radar thing. Here Zóbel (1924–1984) becomes the marquee name. The catalogue explains his circuitous route to Cuenca from the Philippines, where he was born. His family was rich. He went to Harvard, spent years in the family business, and was a part-time and then full-time artist and collector. Zóbel was searching for a space for a private museum, and Cuenca’s mayor offered him a row of dilapidated casas colgadas, or hanging houses. It wasn’t until 1980 that Zóbel gave the art he collected and displayed to the Juan March Foundation.

I’d never heard of most of the artists in the Meadows show, which is fine. Feito’s paintings are big and luminous. He mixes sand and paint, so his forms jump at us, first in muted colors in the ’50s, then, in the ’60s, hot scarlet and yellow. José Guerrero’s Blue Intervals, from 1971, is a big painting based on a book of matches. It’s the one work in the show that seems inspired by Moorish arches and columns.

Eva Lootz’s Black Painting, from 1974, looks like an imaginary landscape with a deep core we sink into. Antonio Lorenzo’s Number 396, from 1964, has straight bands of color, one on the left in yellow and mauve, and on the right in brown and black. They’re lushly painted but resolutely horizontal. Off center, the two bands collide and seem to explode.

Strange as it might seem, abstraction is a more natural fit for Spanish art than, say, American art. The default style in American art was, until around 1980, realism. The Abstract Expressionists ruled supreme in the late ’40s into the early ’60s but sputtered and were replaced in hotness by Pop Art, which is representational. Now, American art is all over the place.

The influence of foreign art waxes and wanes in Spain over the centuries. Painters from Flanders, Burgundy, and Italy were imports, and some, such as El Greco, came from Rome and stayed. Some brought Italian-style, Renaissance-infused illusionism, what’s called window-on-the-world perspective. The default look, though, the truly Spanish look, is painting that doesn’t work overtime to persuade us that its surface, whether a canvas or a panel, isn’t flat.

Spanish medieval altarpieces, called retablos, are not only flat against the wall but very much not illusionistic. Everything seems to happen on the surface. A large retablo wouldn’t have life-size figures. Rather, a dozen or more small paintings are stacked in rows. For realism — and corporeality — the Spanish have preferred painted sculpture, which, given its material, is best suited.

Even Velázquez, indebted as he was to Rubens and the Venetians, tends toward flatness. His genius is in sparkling paint surfaces that are suggestive and abstract. Velázquez and, later, Goya, are faithful to materials. Both were master dabbers. Dabs of paint, that is. As indebted as Picasso was to Cézanne, his abstract work is very Spanish.

Modern abstract art tends to be both depth-phobic and concerned with the intrinsic value of materials. An abstract painting is, first and foremost, about paint. This is clear in the Meadows exhibition, which explains why the work is so powerful. The Meadows is very clever in giving Spanish abstract art some impressive roots in the past. The In the Shadow of Dictatorship galleries wrap around the Meadows’s spacious Spanish medieval-art gallery, the high point of which is Martín de Soria’s retablo from Aragon, painted in 1480.

The catalogue is great and presents a nuanced story on the state of the arts in Spain during the Franco era. I’ve written about the Juan March Foundation, which saw the light of day only because March played a role as Franco’s fixer. Franco and his people didn’t go out of their way to crush avant-garde art. That was the tactic of Nazis and Communists.