On Second Thought

Sometime in the late 1650s, when he was about 40 years old, Bartolome Esteban Murillo painted his self-portrait. The picture is exquisitely rendered, but it’s also odd and revealing.

The Spanish artist chose to paint his dashing likeness on an imaginary block of stone. The block rests on an angle atop a ledge or commode, like an artifact on display. A chiseled frame, broken at the upper left, is carved around his portrait bust, but otherwise the gray block is chipped and abraded. The portrait stone appears old, a fragment salvaged from an antique era.

“I am an artist for the ages,” this unusual composition declares, matching candor with ambition and skill. Murillo combines his clever intimation of antiquity with an intensely observed realism, invoking the glories of the past to describe his objective for the present.

For much of the last century it has been hard to take too seriously Murillo’s painted proposition regarding his own importance as an artist. “Sentimental” is the word--or epithet--most commonly associated with the Spaniard’s work. It has often been applied to his many pictures of scruffy urchins, bright-eyed children and beatific Madonnas, born aloft on clouds of lily-wielding cherubs. These paintings are a source for any number of department store knockoffs and a lot of calendar art. Introductory college textbooks on the history of European painting rarely even bothered to mention him.

Well, it’s time to revise the textbooks. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a new exhibition of Murillo’s paintings is an unexpected gem. Limited to works borrowed from American museums and private collections, it’s the first solo survey of the artist ever organized in the United States. It shouldn’t be the last.

Murillo was prolific. The show is not large--just 33 pictures--although many of the paintings are. All but two have religious subjects, and only one is focused on the theme of children. (It’s a depiction of St. Thomas of Villanueva as a well-born child, shown removing his fine clothes and handing them out to a grateful group of beggar boys.) But there are many extraordinary paintings on view, including the aforementioned self-portrait that hangs near the entrance--which has been held in a private collection and is being seen in public for the first time since 1848. And the exhibition might just change your mind about the persuasive uses of sentiment in art.

Murillo was born into a comfortable family in Seville in 1617, and he died there in 1682 after falling from a scaffold while working on an altarpiece in nearby Cadiz. He trained with artists locally. The familiar blend of naturalism and somber gloom most famously associated with Francisco de Zurbaran is readily apparent in the show’s earliest painting. A Franciscan monk, standing before a startled group of townsmen on a hilltop, gestures toward an apparition in the distance. There, the translucent golden figure of King Philip II of Spain--a vision of his immortal soul--ascends to heaven above a miraculous blaze of fire.

Murillo was 27 when he painted this large and impressive work--one of 11 canvases on the subject of Franciscan miracles that were his first important commission. With the Counter-Reformation in full swing, the Catholic Church had need of painters capable of unusual feats. If the Bible was filled with miracles, and if religious faith overflowed with mysteries, the task for Counter-Reformation art was to depict them. Murillo’s cycle of Franciscan marvels did.

A year or so later, he made an artistic leap. A magnificent painting of “The Flight Into Egypt” turns on the life-size figure of the sleeping infant Jesus, cradled in his mother’s arms. Joseph firmly leads the gentle donkey that they ride through an indeterminate landscape. The child virtually glows, a blissful smile implanted on his lips. Mary is serene, while stoic Joseph, hovering close by, doesn’t take his eyes off the pair.

Any Christian who saw this painting circa 1650 knew full well that the little family was fleeing for its life. No one else would know it, though. Murillo doesn’t stick with the dramatic narrative. He doesn’t portray a risky adventure. Nobody breaks a sweat. Through the rhetoric of sentimental feeling, he lets you know it all turns out just fine. The perilous journey through life is assuaged through the power of familial love.

Murillo’s painting is as much an exhortation about human experience as it is an instructive Bible story. The sacred converges with the profane.

No doubt the experience he’s relating is in part his own. In 1645 Murillo had married Beatriz Cabrera y Villalobos, and soon she bore the first of 11 children that arrived during their 20 years of marriage. “The Flight Into Egypt” to some degree represented the new journey of his own as-yet small family, which he depicted in an empathetic manner.

Murillo didn’t travel to the cosmopolitan capital of Madrid until a dozen years after he finished this wonderfully accomplished picture. There, perhaps through the intercession of his fellow Sevillian artist, the incomparable Diego Velazquez, he was able to gain entrance to various royal and aristocratic collections.

Almost half the exhibition is composed of pictures painted in the decade or so after the artist’s return to Seville from this eye-opening trip. Visual qualities of the Venetian and Flemish paintings he studied there, especially those by Rubens, soon found their way into his own work. Murillo’s paintings became richer in color, looser in brushwork.

The show was jointly organized by Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum, where it was seen in the spring, and LACMA, which owns Murillo’s oil sketch for the altarpiece that he was working on when he died. The selections were made by guest curator Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt. It’s beautifully installed on the ground floor of the Anderson Building. Sensitive juxtapositions are made.

In two cases, paintings of the same subject from different periods in Murillo’s career are deftly placed in different galleries, where they both can be obliquely seen from a single vantage. The comparisons are instructive.

The crisp, tight, sensational composition of the “Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” from the late 1650s becomes fluid and ethereal--more relaxed--20 years later. And the harrowing sight of a bloodied Christ consoled by angels after his brutal flagellation is subsequently transformed from melodrama into a focused vision of stark humility. There’s not an extraneous brush stroke in the second painting, which is the most powerful work in the show.

Murillo’s most celebrated pictures in American collections are probably “Two Women at a Window” from the National Gallery and “Four Figures on a Step” from the Kimbell. Both terrific genre scenes are probably pre-Madrid, painted around the same time (circa 1655-60). Like “The Flight Into Egypt,” they’re executed with skillful realism; unlike the biblical tale, their stories are unknown.

No one is quite sure what the flirting girls at the window are up to. Some have suggested they’re courtesans (if so, they’re demure). Nor do we know in the other canvas what is represented by the young dandy, the winking maid and the bespectacled matron delousing the hair of an urchin with torn pants. (The business of prostitution has likewise been proposed, as has the possibility of an as yet undiscovered literary narrative.)

This much is certain. In both, the ambiguous, enigmatic quality of the painting is itself a main factor in its modern acceptance. A pass can thus be given to their significant quotient of sentimental feeling.

The modern era is an age of doubt, not devotion, and has responded to these unclear pictures accordingly. Murillo, by contrast, was a devotional painter--like most Spanish Baroque artists of the era, major and minor. The inventive abstraction in El Greco and the conceptual brilliance in Velazquez made them the big exceptions for their day, which the modern world embraced.

But radical doubt and cleareyed devotion are oil and water. It’s no wonder Murillo’s reputation skidded in the 20th century. Now that we’ve left that century behind, this exhibition makes a persuasive case for looking at Murillo anew.

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“Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682): Paintings From American Collections,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, through Oct. 6. Closed Wednesdays.