DMN: Meadows celebrates Spanish painter who enthralled USA

[Webmaster]

Born in 1863, Sorolla was an orphan and was raised by relatives. His utter facility as a painter was recognized early and, by the time he was 30, a painting by him won a medal of honor at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, or the great Chicago World’s Fair.

This started a career so successful that even Sargent was jealous. By the time Sorolla died at 60 in 1923, large exhibitions of his work had been held in London, Paris and Madrid. His U.S. exhibitions broke attendance records in New York — 160,000 people in less than a month in 1909 — and went on to Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., and, in another form in 1911, to Chicago and St. Louis.

Hundreds of his most important paintings were purchased from those exhibitions by American private and public collections. Sorolla’s success was such that he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, painted President William Howard Taft in the White House and received commissions for portraits of the wife of J. Pierpont Morgan, a U.S. secretary of state, tastemaker Louis Comfort Tiffany and many other grandees.

Yet, unlike Sargent, who was known in America predominantly as a portraitist, Sorolla was understood to be a well-rounded artist whose landscapes, genre scenes and even historical paintings had a fluency and immediacy that even the impressionists could envy.

The Meadows Museum presents the first large-scale exhibition to re-create Sorolla’s remarkable reign in America. Sadly, it can only hint at his greatest achievement, the immense murals for the Hispanic Society in New York, The Provinces of Spain (1912-19), which, though recently cleaned and reinstalled, are too large to be shipped.

Even without them, more than 150 works occupy all but one gallery on the second floor of the Meadows Museum to form the largest and most ambitious exhibition yet mounted by the museum. “Sorolla and America” is the brainchild of its director, Mark Roglán, an expert in 19th-century art.

The rest of the article here: http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment ... merica.ece

[ponyboy]

What a great museum we have on campus!

[Mustangsabu]

I will be checking that out. Love the museum and the exhibitions it puts on are some of the most interesting. This one would appear especially so.

The MM is one of the things that sets SMU above countless other schools.

[smusportspage]

It is really quite exceptional.