Guggenheim's Extraordinary Spanish Extravaganza

Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), "Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables," ca. 1602, Collection Várez Fisa, Madrid

In his NY Times review today of the Guggenheim's just opened Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso, Michael Kimmelman leads with three paragraphs archly questioning the museum's motives. Then he finally gets around to calling the show "very grand and quite marvelous."

CultureGrrl would lead with the "grand and marvelous" part. Who can be meanspirited about a show that gives us the rare chance to feast on 11 Zurbaráns, not to mention 12 Velázquezes, 22 Goyas and 35 Picassos (although only four by the show's other title artist, El Greco)?

True, I might have preferred the hypnotic power of the 11 Zurbaráns to have been concentrated in one place. But the Guggenheim opted for a meritorious curatorial concept of demonstrating affinities among Spanish artists tackling the same themes across five centuries. It's a sometimes chaotic but rich mix, with resonances that are sometimes superficial but often illuminating.

Had I but time, I could have spent a few hours absorbing every luminous detail in Velázquez's "Peasants at the Table," which journeyed to New York from the Szépmüvészeti Museum in Budapest.

And part of the fun of such a broad-ranging exhibition is developing a new appreciation for artists you previously knew little about. For me, that was still-life painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. He also introduced me to a new vegetable, the cardoon (that pinkish stalkish thing on the right in the above image).

A few quibbles: I'm not an audio-guide person, and I would have appreciated a little more text elucidating the relationships among individual paintings and providing more background on some of the greatest masterpieces. Surely Zurbarán's monumental but still intimate "Saint Hugh in the Refectory (Saint Bruno and the Miracle of the Uneaten Meat)," from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville, and rarely seen outside of Spain, rates its own descriptive label.

And the quality of chosen examples by some artists, especially Picasso, was uneven, with a surprising number of works in the show coming from private collections. But Spanish museums were also generous lenders: 15 works from the Prado; 10 from the Reina Sofia.

In an ideal world, I would have wished the Guggenheim to have included an ancillary show bringing Spanish painting right up to the present. Why should a museum whose historic focus was modern and contemporary art, and which now has a satellite museum in Bilbao that collects current Spanish work, stop dead with Dalí and Picasso?

And I also would have desired a more agreeable ending: With 15 of its own designated themes to choose from, why leave us (especially those of us who are non-Christian) in the agonies of crucifixion? I'd sooner consume cardoons.

Disappointingly, the Guggenheim still isn't making good on its promise to give credit to curators in the exhibition wall text---an especially unfortunate omission in this curatorial tour de force: All credit, from CultureGrrl, to Carmen Giménez and Francisco Calvo Serraller.