A soldier who drowns in a river victoriously raises his sword, his head hanging at the end. Further towards the center of the stream, a dismembered arm holding a rifle flies through the air. Under this drawing which represents a fierce battle, we can read: “The civilization of… civilized nations”. This is the July 1870 cover of The skinnyone of several satirical journals that appeared in the late 19th century and were credited with inspiring Ramón María del Valle-Inclán to create the esperpento aesthetic. The style distorts reality, ideal for showing the absurdity of Spain and the world of the time, and which the Reina Sofía Museum reinterprets in the exhibition Grotesque. Popular art and aesthetic revolution.
Valle-Inclán finds in the grotesque, a notion inaugurated in 1920 with his play Bohemian lightsa concave mirror to reflect the violence of political, colonial and social injustice. The man from Pontevedra fled the conventions of the institutions of the Bourbon Restoration to present a picture of social degradation due to fraudulent bipartisanship, the disaster of 98 or poverty in a largely agricultural country. “Valle-Inclán’s grotesque vision reflected the miserable reality of the moment (…) The grotesque differs from the grotesque by managing to interweave the experience of daily life, aesthetics and social problems,” explains Teresa Velázquez, one of the six curators of the exhibition. exhibition which opens its doors this Thursday and will be open until March 10, 2025.
Carnival kings, beggars, drunkards, mutilated men, blind men and repressed strikers parade in this great exhibition. In addition to presenting paintings by renowned Spanish artists (Ángeles Santos, Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, José Gutiérrez Solana, María Blanchard, Antonio Fillol or Laxeiro) and international artists (Umberto Boccioni, José Clemente Orozco or André Masson), the The exhibition also includes postcards, theater projection devices, masks, press and pre-cinematographic designs. “The formulation of the grotesque is not limited to theater, which allows us to expand the context to various disciplines and establish analogies between popular culture and aesthetic revolutions,” explains Velázquez.
Goya, a beacon for the grotesque
The antecedents of the grotesque, which was not conceived with a manifesto, but through the dialogue of the characters of Valle-Inclán, are the comic-parodic vision of the satirical magazines and of Goya, to whom the Galician writer attributed the invention of the grotesque. It is precisely with the influence of the Aragonese that the exhibition begins. No work is published Absurdity or black paintings, but its popular motifs: the misfits in the street with distorted faces represented in pieces by Gutiérrez Solana or Lucas Velázquez. In addition, optical inventions that became popular at the end of the 19th century and which wanted to see a new angle of reality are exhibited, such as the magic lantern, shadow theater or the fantasscope.
“The grotesque was positioned as a curiosity of Spanish theater which could infect other expressions. Popular culture does not remain frozen on the margins of social transformations and sees how popular arts are capable of relating to the struggles for emancipation, which are at the center of Valleinclanesco’s imagination, and we have brought them together through a set of works that are the stages of Valle-Inclán’s work,” explains José Antonio Sánchez, another curator.
A second section reviews the rise of spiritualism, theosophy and occultism in the early 20th century as a rejection of physical reality, devastated by the First World War. Valle-Inclán addressed pseudosciences and spiritualist circles The wonderful lamp of 1916, as well as the consumption of psychotropic substances to modify perception The kif pipe. The triptych is almost contemporary mental states by Umberto Boccioni, hazy and spectral, loaned by MoMA for the exhibition.
The term grotesque having stage roots, the exhibition devotes particular attention to theater. Masks, decorations, posters are hung and in the third section, the Piccoli puppet theater by Vittorio Podrecca has been recreated on a large scale. “Puppet theater is a popular entertainment model that has been likened to a worldview in which someone ‘pulls the strings.’ A metaphor that transforms human beings into puppets managed by hidden elites,” added Sánchez. Valle-Inclán himself was surprised by this form of entertainment and declared in 1921: “Now I write for dolls. It’s something I created that I call “Esperpentos.” This theater cannot be represented by actors, but by dolls, like the Teatro dei Piccoli in Italy.
Two thematic axes fly over Grotesque. Popular art and aesthetic revolution and they have their own themed rooms: carnival and nightlife. In the first, Valle-Inclán found the crudest expression of the popular to realize his artistic thesis: absurdity and decadence to overthrow conventions. The caricatures of Feliu Elías or Juan Gris appear here. While in Spanish nightlife, two sides emerge: that of bohemianism (with the nocturnal scenes of Blanchard or Ricardo Baroja Nessi) and that of anarchism, with the visceral paintings of Antonio Fillol.
The exhibition, in the last rooms, wanted to show how the grotesque legacy of Valle-Inclán surpassed his death and continues today. A production will present a contemporary revision of the novel Tyrant Flags (1926), according to the version in birch (theatrical genre in which a single actor represents the entire play) imagined by Rivas Cherif, under the title I don’t need to keep dreaming about the dead bodies I saw. And the exhibition ends with a sound installation created by Maricel Álvarez and Marcelo Martínez in which a chapter of the work is recreated The Iberian Arena.
