Spanish Art

Anonymous Catalonian
Eucharistic Cabinet 1375–1400
tempera, gilding, and glazed silver leaf on poplar wood
Museum Purchase, Meadows Foundation Funds
91.07
This cabinet is an unusual kind of eucharistic container, or tabernacle, which was used to store the reserve host for outside the mass. Monumental cabinets such as this seem to have been common in the Catalan region of Rosselló (now French Roussillon) in the late fourteenth century; however, very few of these objects survive. The cabinet's eucharistic function is reflected in its lively figural paintings, which link the bread and wine of the eucharist with key events of salvation history: the Annunciation scene on the doors refers to the transubstantiation of the host during the mass, while the Crucifixion on the rear wall includes such eucharistic symbols as angels and a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young.

Although some elements of the cabinet reflect subsequent attempts at restoration, its most important painted elements remain well preserved. For example, the Islamic-inspired mudéjar ornament on the outer faces of both doors bear a vivid witness to the diversity of Spanish medieval culture.


Domenikos Theotokopulos, called El Greco (1541–1614)
Saint Francis Kneeling in Meditation 1605–1610
oil on canvas
Museum Purchase, Meadows Acquisition Fund with private donations and University funds
99.01
The Cretan-born artist Domenikos Thetokopoulos, better known as "El Greco," spent the majority of his life and career in Spain, where he would live from about 1577 until his death in 1614. There his revolutionary genius was nurtured by the appreciative and unusually refined artistic clientele of sixteenth-century Toledo. El Greco's innovative spirit is exemplified by this painting of Saint Francis in mediation, a composition in which the artist repeated several times later in his life. The painting is a devotional work that emphasizes Francis's role as a spiritual model. Kneeling before a rocky grotto, he contemplates a crucifix, a skull, and a breviary to demonstrate his detachment from the world, an attitude consistent with the contemporary Counter-Reformation ideals.


Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660)
Female Figure (Sibyl with Tabula Rasa) circa 1648
oil on canvas Algur H. Meadows Collection
74.01
This eloquent female figure is among the most enigmatic of Velázquez's canvases. The work's subject has been disputed, but it very likely represents one of the ancient sibyls, prophetesses of Classical mythology who later were believed to have foretold aspects of Christian history. One element which complicates our reading of the work is the simple dress of the figure, which stands in contrast to the more exotically garbed sibyls popularized by Italian contemporaries of Velázquez, such as Domenichino and Guido Reni. Such dress is found, however, in the more classicized sibyl types of the Italian High Renaissance, including those depicted by Michelangelo in his frescoes for the Sistine chapel, works with which Velázquez had become acquainted during his first trip to Rome in 1629-30.


Jusepe de Ribera and Assistants (1591–1652)
Saint Paul the Hermit 1635 - 1650
oil on canvas Algur H. Meadows Collectio
n 75.01
Of the many works produced by Jusepe de Ribera, perhaps the most influential were his mages of penitent saints in meditation, a genre seen at its best in this painting of St. Paul the Hermit. Ribera's penitent saints were widely imitated by Spanish artists of the latter half of the seventeenth century. The earthy realism of the saint shown in the corrugated forehead, emaciated torso, and grimy, knotted, yet graceful hands, emphasized Paul's devotion to a spiritual ideal while demonstrating the artist's skillful handling of texture, anatomy, and physiognomy.


Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)
Yard with Madmen 1794
oil on tin-plated iron
Algur H. Meadows Collection
67.01
This small but surprisingly powerful work was produced at the most critical moment of Goya's long career. In the last months of 1792, a serious illness beset and left him physically debilitated and permanently deaf. During his recuperation in 1793-1794, Goya undertook a series of small-scale paintings on metal in which, as he wrote to a colleague at the Real Academia de San Fernando. Goya wrote, "I dedicated myself to painting a suite of cabinet pictures, in which I succeeded in making observation which ordinarily are not allowed in commissioned works, where caprice and invention have little part to play." Of the twelve painting in this series, Goya's letters refer specifically to one, the Meadows painting, which he described as "a yard with lunatics, in which two nude men fight with their warden beating them."


Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828)
A Way of Flying c. 1815 - 1820
etching, aquatint, and drypoint
Algur H. Meadows Collection
67.09.13
A Way of Flying is print #13 in the series Los Disparates, which, roughly translated means mad and absurd ideas. Los Disparates was Goya's last major project in printmaking and is the most difficult to understand and interpret. The scenes that we find in these 18 plates vary considerably; some scholars have connected these prints to such diverse issues as politics, dreams, proverbs and the carnival, but these suggestions have been disputed as well. Los Disparates is arguably the best example of Goya's printmaking. His virtuosity in engraving, his control of color tonalities, and his use of aquatint and drypoint are all evident in this series.


Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923)
The Blind Man of Toledo 1906
oil on canvas
Museum purchase, Meadows Foundation funds with private donations;
Accession number 03.01
Sorolla is famous for his technique of painting sun-drenched light. While this light has its most eye-blinding brilliance in Sorolla's seashore and beach paintings, the same intense illumination breaks through he clouds here. Moving through darkness like a blazing knife, this Iberian light is at home in Texas, where a similar solar concentration is seen. The effects in nature which Sorolla sought were instantaneous and rapidly changing. To capture these in the dense material of oil paint the artist used patterned patches of color and just pigment laid on with broad brush that sought more to suggest that to define too fully.


Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973)
Still Life in a Landscape 1915
oil on canvas
Algur H. Meadows Collection
69.26
The introduction of papier collé into cubist works in 1912 began the radical stylistic shift from the initial, analytic phase of Cubism to the second, synthetic phase. The earlier form of Cubism, called analytic Cubism existed from 1909 to 1912 and had been characterized by a limited color range, faceted and geometrically broken shapes evocative of a multiplicity of viewpoints simultaneously seen, and a shallow but varied pictorial space. The synthetic mode of Cubism started in 1912 used numerous and textured colors, introduced larger formal units that were layered and flat rather than interknit and ridged, and made pictorial space shallower and more ambiguous than had analytic Cubism.

The importance of collage (in which a variety of materials is cut up and pasted onto the picture surface) in synthetic Cubism can be seen in the Meadows painting. While the piece has no actual collage elements, Picasso's approach to representing the images is reminiscent of that technique - segments are clearly separated, some colored areas have patterns which seem almost printed, and the pictorial space has the shallow, overlapped nature of the collage.


Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)
Eve in Despair 1915
marble
Elizabeth Meadows Sculpture Collection
69.06
Rodin's Eve in Despair is one of his most outstanding marble sculptures in an American collection. The piece was commissioned from the artist in 1906 by the famous gun manufacturer, Samuel P. Colt, and was completed and delivered by Rodin in 1915. The smooth polished surfaces of the body contrast with the more abrupt relief of the intentionally abandoned areas of the head and the pedestal, thereby establishing an evocative and poetic dialogue. The inspiration for this piece has been thought to be the famous Florentine slave sculptures in the collection of the Louvre in Paris by Michelangelo, to whom Rodin otherwise owes such a great debt.