Studio: international art (80.1920)

MODERN SPANISH PAINTING

' GRANDS SEIGNEURS ET MENDIANTS "
BY VALENTIN DE ZUBIAURRE

fashion of his day, reveal in their technique
a modernism which in certain respects has
not been surpassed even since the dis-
coveries of Chevreuil and Helmholtz were
applied to painting. In this way Rosales
was truly the bridge connecting the
art of Spain as it was at the beginning of
the nineteenth century with that of its end,
and thanks to him it was possible for
latter-day evolution to come about without
the abrupt shocks that in other countries
made of it a veritable revolution, a a
And this process was worth understand-
ing, in order to realise how the absolute
balance we observe in the works of the
brothers de Zubiaurre was achieved. 0

Sorolla is all air and light. His exact
application of the principles of the earlier
168

Impressionism, his realism, which con-
strains him to paint with eye and hand just
that which he sees and just as he sees it,
combine to make him, altogether apart
from the subjects of his pictures, a painter
of no definite nationality, tied to no country
and to no School. And his masses of
sunshine might be falling just as well on
the shores of any continent as on those of
Valencia. Therefore when the foreigner
classes Sorolla with the Spanish School
it is solely because he remembers his place
of origin—which is far from being all that
is necessary to determine the matter.
Zuloaga, on the other hand, is Spanish
wholly and intensely, and his sources of
inspiration, as all can see, spring from
works as essentially Spanish as it is
possible for them to be—those of el Greco