The exoticizing look

One month ago, Alicia Forneri and I discussed the influence of Spanish folklore in the artistic movements around the world. So, here is her post about it…

While it is true that there have been  great travelers from Spain, and that our country has made a significant contribution to the discovery and description of other peoples and cultures, it is also to be noted that  especially in the nineteenth century, we were the ones who woke up the curiosity of travelers from the rest of Europe.

sorolla1914The nineteenth -century romantic look became the root for the creation of many Spanish clichés. Although, in the twentieth century, the increase of number of travelers and information  dismantled progressively those clichés,  their traces remained displayed within the museums.

In this respect, the place that best represents all these elements for the romantic artist is Andalusia. Its Moorish past, flamenco, bullfighting and of course, its gypsy women as a prototype of Spanish women, fed the imagination of many artists who travelled to these lands in search of the image that symbolizes the essential qualities of the Spanish culture.

Several views are given by artists, both national and international, of the gypsy woman identified as the Spanish woman. Features like the sensuality and mystery are part of these particular visions, forming what will be the image of Spain to foreign eyes. An image linked over the years to anti-humanism and the exotic.

Moreover,  the diffusion of a large number of literary gypsy characters (Carmen,  from Mérimée or La Concha from La femme et le panti, by Louys ) blended the image of the Andalusian woman with the gypsy one, reaching this mystification its peak in 1883 with the revival of the opera Carmen, by Bizet.

The gypsywoman  long symbolized the image of a free woman with light morals. During the nineteenth century we find numerous archetypal portraits with scruffy gypsy women of generous chest, streaming hair and provocative smile – portraits that must have been shocking to more than one contemporary spectator.

In this way we can see how the stereotypes assigned to the gypsies by the bourgeoisie, exert a double influence; on the one hand their clothes, sensual movements and freedom of action symbolize a “lighter” moral than th one that the  conventional society of the time was ready to assimilate positively.  On the other hand, these same characteristics exert a powerful attraction, not only to artists, but also to the middle class that rejected them publicly.

Artists such as John Singer Sargent, Hermen Anglada-Camarasa,  Mariano Fortuny, Isidre Nonell or Joaquin Sorolla in painting and J. Laurent and Charles Clifford in photography will be central to setting and touring this Spanish character image through Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Madrid currently has a large collection of works following this line. From the Museum of Romanticism, through the Sorolla Museum, to  Prado Museum rooms devoted to the nineteenth century,  the tour of the stereotypes of the Spanish imagery, not entirely forgotten, is assured…Let´s take you there !

Alicia

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