ART REVIEW : The Comfortable Fiction of Spain’s Joaquin Sorolla

They say that a happy life has no history. Maybe that goes for happy art too. Take the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla, an orphaned kid born in 1863. He rose until he was bracketed with the likes of his friend John Singer Sargent as a technical wizard and urbane international master. In 1909, his New York exhibition drew 160,000 visitors. Respected critics larded him with praise, calling him the greatest Spanish master since Velazquez and Goya. Archer Huntington lent princely patronage and he was commissioned to do a portrait of President William Howard Taft. Gogglingly prolific, his first Paris show included more than 400 works and reading about his life becomes a relentless tattoo of one copious show after the next. When did the man sleep? When he died in 1923, he left some 4,000 paintings and twice as many drawings. His house in Madrid was turned into a museum.

Nobody looking at that track record then would have assumed that a traveling survey of his work now would be like the exhumation of an obscure curiosity. It was organized by Sorolla’s hometown museum the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno and the San Diego Museum of Art, where it is on view to Oct. 29.

What went wrong? Well, history rolled over on him, of course. He was a conservative even in his own day, belonging to an ilk that fell into a historical black hole with the triumph of Modernism. But the work is dazzling. At its best, as in “In the Rowing Boat,” it approaches the compositional crispness of Manet or Mary Cassatt.

The show begins with a rather somber social-realist period in the 1880s. He painted a woman arrested for killing her child and an operetta-esque tableau of a priest defending a poor demented fellow from a crowd of taunting toughs, but you can tell his heart wasn’t in it. He’s more interested in the staging than the drama. There are a couple of restrained portraits of men in tuxes. The rendering is so lively behind the controlled paint you feel like you can read the flicker of drifting thoughts behind the sitters’ faces. It’s a clue to Sorolla’s real interest.

Sorolla was in touch with the elan vital revealed by strong sunlight, and his art is mostly about that. He painted big scenes like “Sewing the Sail” with a group of happy peasants choreographically arranged around a huge swath of white sun-dappled canvas and framed by pots of begonias. He painted oxen hauling sailing skiffs out of the sea after a day’s fishing. The surf gave him a chance to paint the forms solid and then break them up in the water reflections, as if to say he could get better abstract art out of reality than those poseurs up in Paris could get out of their imaginations.

There are moments when he is so brilliant, the idea that he fell out of sight seems as absurd to us as Frank Stella being forgotten in the year 2089. (Actually, that seems a bit more plausible.)

Sorolla loved to paint pictures of naked kids at the beach. In “The White Boat,” he shows a couple of pubescent boys in the water hanging on to a line from a little boat. The water is as good as a Monet, the scene a bit like the contemporary painter Eric Fischl. Interesting. Fischl’s nude kids are sexually charged but Sorolla’s aren’t. Even the single female nude in the show has no erotic edge. There’s an almost disturbing level of detached healthy-mindedness in Sorolla’s art that puts everything in sight on the same mental plane. A couple of naked babies crawling out of the surf look like evolved amphibians, and the little girl watching them is just another giant frog whose only claim to higher evolutionary status is a cloth dress and a straw hat. That’s interesting in itself but Sorolla doesn’t make it into an idea; it’s just a side-effect of his fascination with the relentless profusion of nature. That was certainly itself a reflection of his own artistic fecundity. We all look in the mirror of life and see ourselves.

Successful as he was, Sorolla had his critics. He was charged with being all brio and fencing-master attack with an air shaft between his ears where his philosophy, feelings and politics ought to have been. Catalogue essays defend him as a smart, politically savvy man who chose his upbeat style on purpose to celebrate Spain.

Retrospectively promoting him as an ecological conservationist and local booster has its winsome side in an exhibition in San Diego. It’s a perfect show for the town. When you walk out of the museum into sunny faux-Iberian Baroque Balboa Park, the surroundings look exactly like a Sorolla painting. If you examine the annals of conservative Southern California beachside art-association art, it is clear that Sorolla was not without influence.

It’s nice to see this revival of Sorolla. His art presents a comforting fiction that may appeal to the physical-fitness generation, but it looks like history got him right the first time. There is just too much missing here. As an artist, he lacked venturesomeness and formal rigor. As a mirror of the human condition, the art seems disingenuous. It cleans up its common folk, robbing them of the trashy zing that vitalizes that life.

Sorolla’s technical mastery can put one in mind of Sargent, Anders Zorn, Boldini or Whistler, but Sorolla avoided their concerns with elegance and aesthetics. He was probably a better balanced man than any of them, leaving us with the paradoxical truth that--artistically speaking--robust health is a little dull.