International studio (60.1916/1917)

Ignacio Zuloaga


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BY IGNACIO ZULOAGA

BASQUE PEASANT

of their original minds which are unconsciously
susceptible to the intellectual requirements of
their age. Yet to many even Zuloaga may prove
to be a shock in spite of this obvious reverence
for tradition.
For in all of us there is more or less a tendency
to believe that the cultivated mind is the one that
appreciates the established and time-honoured
past. This is not so; the truly cultured mind is
the one that can appreciate the innovation, that
can see the value of a new thing. To the first
idea attaches an air of respectability, but respect-
ability alone has done little for humanity, and in

its usually accepted sense merely props up
institutions that have outlived their useful-
ness, and exist for the purpose of provid-
ing moral satisfaction and support for those
who have not the power or courage to stand
alone. Yet I can see another use, perhaps
a very important one for this retrospective
tendency. It regulates the speed of prog-
ress, although again we can go further and
speculate as to whether a system that re-
quires such an expedient is founded on the
soundest of principles.
Zuloaga is by no means a dreamer, yet
there are many aspects of his art which may
contradict this, as any one designation can
be contradicted, by work radiating so many
qualities. He seeks or finds unconsciously
and never avoids the truth, however un-
pleasant. To do so is weak and servile.
He grasps the truth, transplants it on the
canvas, brutally if you will, but with a
brutality that is so profound that the sor-
didness and the filth, the spurious atmos-
phere, the accumulation of make-believe
of generations of pretended Christianity
crumbles in his hands, leaving nature alone
resplendent in the interpretation of a great
mind. Zuloaga paints with all the force and
power and that freedom from shirking the
truth that characterizes Ibsen and Strind-
berg in dealing with the usually avoided
yet most vital problems of life. And, with
the exception of such purely individualistic
geniuses as Whistler, no art or writing of
to-day can live that does not reflect in spirit
the big problems the world is trying to solve.
Our period is one of introspection the world
over, and no creative work can legitimately
evolve from present-day conditions without evi-
dence of this state of the universal mind. And it is
in this analytical tendency that lies the hope of the
future. The unfortunate thing is that people are
misled by words. We use words that are quite
inadequate to convey our full meaning. “Art” and
“poetry” to most people do not signify two branch-
es of human expression evolving from conditions
peculiar to each period and which can never be
repeated, but concrete and isolated things done
according to a formula, and when I emphasize
the idea so much I do not mean that the idea
shorn of aesthetic accomplishment is sufficient, but

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