SOROLLA: PAINTER OF LIGHT

...He did not limit himself to the application of color in little strokes or tiny dots, but lavished pigments on the canvas in rich impasto...

...Sorolla could not help becoming the creator of pictures that exude pleasure and delight in doing nothing more...

...He was one of those artists who perform most admirably when moved by familiar scenes...

...Sorolla was represented in the Spanish sections of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and at the Paris Exposition of 1900 (where he won the Grand Prix...

...His parents were poor, and they died during a cholera epidemic when Joaquin was only two...

...fishing boats with triangular sails racing close to the coast...

...he was hailed as a second Velasquez even though his pictures rarely, if ever, recall this Old Master...

...peasant women with babies, or with wicker baskets on their arms...

...This fascination with outdoor brilliance is virtually all Sorolla had in common with Monet and his fellow Impressionists, with whom Sorolla is often connected, erroneously, in histories of art...

...He was an indefatigable producer of pictures...

...naked little boys playing in the foaming surf...

...Geographic differences can play a crucial role...

...But the pictures reveal that the artist was neither deeply involved with, nor thoroughly interested in, the subjects (who, it is true, included many a stuffed shirt...

...They were least enamored with his countless portraits of Spanish royalty, aristocrats, scholars, and statesmen, and of high-ranking or wealthy foreigners...

...Sorolla grouped his models around the dusty open bull ring of Valencia, enveloping them in smoke to get the most realistic effects possible...

...At any rate, psychological penetration—the sharp analysis displayed in portraits by his coevals Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec— is sadly missing...

...But this is not quite true...

...Liberation came when he was fifteen...

...He portrayed authentic people (though his farmers and fishermen are shown at moments of health and strength, never in illness or hunger...

...His books include "Modigliani" and "Chagall Watercolors and Gouaches...

...Painters, no matter what their "school," admire his unerring sense of light and shade, his clever silhouette effects, and his skillful application of accents...

...But artists cannot always be squeezed into categories according to schools or "isms...

...He did not confine himself to their strict "rainbow palette...

...fanners with sturdy red oxen, and similar genre scenes...

...Joaquin sweated in the smithy, but he was allowed to attend a special school for artisans, where he drew assiduously, and even carried off several prizes...

...With great gusto, and emphasis on quick movement, he painted women vacationers wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and white chiffon dresses, carrying parasols while walking on the glistening shore...

...Joaquin was sixteen when his talents were discovered by a well-known photographer, a generous patron of the arts, who not only bought his pictures, but nine years later gave Sorolla his daughter's hand in marriage...

...Where there are several figures, they are grouped with artful plausibility, and they are strongly modeled in fresh color, with a good sense for space, depth, and, above all, the play of light...

...Some of his paintings, especially the society portraits that made him a millionaire, have meretricious elements...

...Sorolla wanted success—and he enjoyed more of it than any artist of his generation, with the possible exception of the American painter, John Sargent (with whom he had much in common...

...His story has a sad beginning and a tragic end...

...He made triumphal visits to the United States in 1909 and 1911 and was commissioned by New York's Hispanic Society to do fourteen large mural canvases representing the people, customs, and costumes of various Spanish provinces...

...Sponsored by> an affluent family, young Sorolla was spared the agonies of so many impecunious artists of his time—particularly those unable to endear themselves to the art establishment...

...Munch was born in an austere northern town, whose climate must have contributed to his often morbid pessimism...

...When the boy turned out to be uninterested in the subjects taught at school—he preferred to draw sketches in his copybooks—the uncle placed him in his own shop, as an apprentice...

...Sorolla never reached Monet's greatness, for the Frenchman succeeded in expanding our aesthetic universe, while the Spaniard did not even try to...

...sailors mending nets...

...Few could render with equal virtuosity the sparkle of sunshine on water...

...he used blacks and browns and grays, whenever it suited him...

...Sorolla, however, never allowed his heavily loaded brush to obscure the underlying structure...

...In his scenes inspired by the Mediterranean, one can almost feel the moisture in the air, almost smell the tangy fragrance of the water, almost sense the direction of the fresh breeze swelling the sails...

...SOROLLA: PAINTER OF LIGHT ALFRED WERNER It is customary to say that no painting of any significance was produced by Spaniards between the death, at eighty-two, of Goya in 1828, and young Picasso's emergence on the art scene seventy-odd years later...

...But the harshest of these critics had to concede that Sorolla could be excellent when he confined himself to small-format pictures with few figures, oils of a non-narrative character...

...Unhampered by any aesthetic canons, through magnificent free movements of the arm holding the over-flowing brush, Sorolla conjured up a chromatic splendor that is often near-blinding...

...Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) was well-known in Europe and the United States in the first two decades of this century...

...Sorolla, on the other hand, was a native of Valencia, one of the brightest and most cheerful cities on Spain's Mediterranean coast, and he grew up under a brilliant sun set in a cloudless sky...

...Among these, the best were those sketched or at least conceived at the beaches that stretch to the north and south of Valencia...

...The picture, El Dos de Mayo, was a tremendous success...

...Shown in the Exposicion Nacional at the capital, it brought the artist a prize, was acquired by the state, and eventually landed in a museum near Barcelona...

...At one time he was grossly overrated...

...Still, Sorolla too was an excellent eye—one that had thoroughly absorbed the offerings of the Valencian littoral, the most fertile slab of land in Europe, perfumed with orange and lemon groves...

...Though in most cases his patrons were given only one sitting, he managed to produce amazingly good likenesses of all these celebrities...

...By 1923, a new crop of critics had arrived, ready to challenge at least some of the fruits of his bravura brush...

...Public collections everywhere (including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art) avidly acquired his works...

...The most valid of his works can be summed up as lyrical songs, paeans to the sun and all else that gives warmth and enhances life...

...Critics in the 1920s complained that his large compositions based on historical themes too often reminded them of works of superficial scene painters, of contrivers of large panoramas...

...Sorolla was no giant artist who opened up to humanity vast new avenues of visual experience...

...He used about six or seven tubes of pigment, especially blue, violet, yellow, and red, and never an absolute white (for him even a newly whitewashed wall contained a thousand nuances of color...

...His glimpses of sun-soaked strands, of lithe wet figures gleaming in a dazzling radiance, of white sails or colorful scarves and skirts twisted by the wind convey an atmosphere of pleasure...

...When Sorolla was only twenty-one, he chose a highly patriotic theme for a picture, unworried that the topic—the uprising of Madrid's citizens against the French invaders on May 2, 1808—had already been dealt with by one of the greatest Spanish painters, Francisco de Goya...

...While Sorolla was not a profound thinker and not an interpreter of man's deepest emotions, this painter can be said to have made perfect use of the beauty, the zest that lies upon the surface of things, and to have done so with a disarming optimism, a lust for life contagious to the unprejudiced viewer...

...Alfred Werner is the eminent art critic and historian...

...But his reputation declined rapidly after his death, and today it is worth stressing that a number of his pictures, especially his smaller sketches, deserve to be rescued from oblivion...

...American reporters could not help observing that he did not look at all like an artist...

...After three years, in 1923, death put a full stop to an existence deprived of any meaning or use...

...Lautrec was a typical representative of decadent Paris, with its nightclubs and bordellos...

...A maternal uncle, a locksmith by trade, adopted the child...

...nevertheless, one should judge him by his best performances, that is, by his clear and warm genre paintings, some of which are "feasts for the eye" whose life-enhancing qualities make them most enjoyable in the gloomy 1970s...

...He was a stock-ily built, conservatively dressed little man, with a neatly trimmed beard, earnest and reserved in his behavior...

...Chronologically, he ought to have developed along post-Impressionist lines like his coeval, the Frenchman Toulouse-Lautrec, or to have become an Expressionist, like the Norwegian Munch...

...If Sorolla fails to fall into any compartment of art history, he can be qualified as a painter of light, whose finest works are joyous hymns to outdoor radiance...

...He led an entirely uneventful, but busy life until he reached fifty-seven, when, while painting in his garden, he suffered a paralytic stroke which turned him into a helpless invalid...

...in Madrid, there is even a Museo Sorolla—the painter's erstwhile home converted into a museum—entirely devoted to his work...

...one need only think of Fortuny and Nonell, both of whom, alas, died too young to mature their great talents, and of Zuloaga and Sorolla, who, by contrast, had long and successful careers...

...He enrolled at Valencia's art school which carried the melodious title, Academia Real de las Bellas Artes de San Carlos...

...The post-Impressionist Cezanne once said about his Impressionist colleague Monet: "He is only an eye—but what an eye...

...That Sorolla could rise far above the level of pictures resembling huge color photographs was proven by his self-portraits and by the somewhat Whistlerian pictures of his wife which have spontaneity, expressiveness, and sensitivity...

...He had two children: a daughter, who became a painter, and a son, who studied engineering in the United States...