It was the same routine today, of being out and about until late and finishing the day at the shopping mall. Our first museum was the Basque Museum, and we were interested to see if there would be differences to the French Basques, who we had learnt a little about in Bayonne in July. Bilbao is in Biscaya, one of the three Basque provinces. The museum included an archaeological and an ethnographic section. A strange beast-like idol of great antiquity stood in the centre of the courtyard. Many coats of arms in stone had been taken from ancient buildings and were now on display around the arched verandahs. Many featured wolves and some of them carried things in their mouths. With so little access to the language, I found it frustrating to try to read about these items. I could appreciate them for their age and for what I could see, but was lost beyond that.
Inside, a magnificent stone carved cross rose up between the stairs. From the bottom it had seemed to have a primitive quality and above the scene of the crucifix, the figures again took on that quality. It is not known when it was made. Pottery from different eras showed a marked preference for cream, green and brown glazes. The most interesting sections related to fishing and the pastoral life, and how very self-sufficient the Basque people traditionally were. Fine linen was woven on looms, and the most beautiful lace created to edge it. There were many models of the white head dress, where large lengths of linen were wound around the head and then twisted into sausage shapes that stuck up or went one way and then turned to go another. It would be hard not to laugh if your mother came out in all seriousness, in one of these constructions. A sign said that much Australian wool has been used in the production of the Basque beret in the past. Fundamentally the lifestyle of self-sufficiency within a small community, of fishing or pastoral activities being the predominant ones, with festivals that are Christian but draw on the ancient lifestyle for inspiration for some aspects and with the sport of pelota and challenges such as lifting stone weights, is similar between the Basques in France and Spain. Of course, the language also provides a unifying marker. The difference seems to be in the history of how the Basque groups have been treated by each other and by conquering groups, with the French seeming to have been left to themselves more, while the Spanish were suppressed at different stages, particularly under the Franco regime in the 20th Century. This museum was not dealing with politics, and was certainly well presented for aspects of lifestyle and culture.
As we walked through the old town to cross the river for the Fine Arts Museum and the Guggenheim Museum, an ambitious double that we had planned, we were distracted by the noisy collectors market taking place in the Plaza Nueva, which was build in 1849 and has arched entries from lots of streets.
Books, records, prints, antiques, canaries, pins, comics – stalls and stalls of everything that is desirable if you are into it and looks like nothing worth having if you are not. The crowd was big and active, searching through titles and checking lists.
A noisier than usual section was impassable, and full of children each with an assisting adult or two. They were carefully going through large piles of cards that they must have bought, of various different kinds, and ticking off their lists of ones that they were yet to get. We couldn’t see if they then sold unwanted ones back or swapped them, but guessed that that might be the case since no-one was leaving and everyone was checking their cards.
Setting off once again, my attention was caught by the sound of music. We followed it to another square, where a very serious group of men in berets including one young punk rocker-type, with spikes that precluded wearing a beret, were warming up their band. They stood in a circle, with one hand drumming and the other playing a pipe. Like the pied pipers, they led the crowd, and us, from the square and headed off. At a corner, Keith pressed the need to at least cross the bridge today, and I never found out what would have happened had we followed on. We could hear them growing fainter and eventually made it nearly to the bridge.
Everyone was out and about on this drizzly Sunday morning and it was clear that bright colours were favoured, along with a strong burnt orange and lime green which were in for winter gear. We joined the crowd in a quick dip into an enormous marquee where all the aid organisations had information and pre-Christmas sales.Finally we were on the bridge, with umbrellas up and energy flagging. We had only had a couple of biscuits for breakfast as we walked and so we looked out for a pre-museum lunch to fuel us.
A visit to another marquee, set up to celebrate integration of people with disabilities, and some more sculpture investigations, brought us up to a fantastic restaurant. They sold all you could eat for 9 Euros ($20), and the food and utensils were all real. There were so many varieties of salads that we only had room to admire the hot food, apart from a little bit of a baked potato dish. There was not a skerrick of rubbish or mess around and people were talking in quiet voices and relaxing.Of course, it was much later than we had intended when we reached the Fine Arts Museum, and, once inside, we realised that we would have to leave the Guggenheim for another day.
The first exhibition we entered displayed work by Nestor Basterretxea, a Basque man who was a sculptor, painter, film maker and furniture designer. He believed that the Basque people had inherited a language that was stripped of iconography, and he wanted to express words in terms of mass and volume. He was essentially expressing Basque ideology through sculptures that were like the ancient artefacts that an archaeologist might have, but hasn’t, found. The first room of sketches for the series called ‘Basque Cosmogonic Series’, did not mean much until after we had seen the sculptures, and then we could appreciate how 3D had been planned in 2D form, and that all the sculptures were planned together, rather than being thought of one after the other. In the second room, a gloomy, sacred kind of space with grey walls and excellent lighting on the sculptures, a circle of remarkable icons had been set out. Every one was very beautiful, made of wood or metal, and very interesting to look at. They would have included echoes of images of significance to Basque people and heritage, and it would have been fascinating to talk to Nestor about what was in his mind for each one. After our trip to Guernica two days later, we understood the significance of the part of a hollow tree trunk, which is kept from the original tree that the Basque leaders met under for many centuries. One of the sculptures was very reminiscent of that shape.
We watched a film on pelota made by Basterretxea, in which the sculptor’s eye treated a documentary subject as art and slowed down the film for appreciation of the balletic forms and focused on movements creating shapes as much as on the equipment and the game. Next was a very long film called ‘Mother Earth’, again a documentary, and covering all aspects of Basque life, culture and tradition. It was similarly filmed to be an artwork, and has music and little speaking. The camera moves in or out of a single aspect, so we are seeing a bay of boats not just as a scene but as a series of focuses, such as the sails, or the ropes to the quay. Part of a film on the artist’s life told of how, as a boy, an artist came to his town of Bermeo to paint a mural about the life of the port. He and his sister were used as models and appear in the scene. Nestor’s great regret is that he didn’t learn Basque, being privately educated in Spanish and then suffering the break up of the family in 1936 at the time of the Civil War. Fleeing first to St Jean de Luz in Basque France, and then to Paris where his father found employment, he started painting at fifteen years old. In 1937 the Germans bombed Guernica on behalf of Franco, hitting a market square and deliberately killing many civilians. The anti-fascist group asked two Basque artists to paint a picture for this event but they were unable to, one because he was fleeing with his family and had his boat tickets. They then approached Pablo Picasso. He painted his famous ‘Guernica’. Meanwhile Nestor and his family set out on what should have been a fifteen day journey to Buenos Aires, arriving after 18 months in 1942. So he has the eye and mind of an exile, whose formative years and his heart were strongly Basque. He returned and his art expresses that aspect of his being. We found the sculptures, which were created in the 1970s, very moving, and the films fascinating beyond just their subject matter. The exhibition is on here until the first of February, and I don’t know where the sculptures are usually shown, but they are really worth seeing.
After that long and very satisfying start here, everything else was a bonus. And what a bonus! We started with Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Basque artists. There was so much to enjoy in this section, which included a lot of famous paintings. We were noticing details of styles and subjects, and some humour as well. Paul Gaugin’s ‘Washerwomen in Arles’, painted when he had gone there to be with Van Gough, showed the development of his distinctive style with an abstract background, flat colours, rigid monumental figures that looked like primitive sculptures, and outlining around the main blocks of colour. A sculpture called ‘The Accident’, 1886, caught a moment of action and was funny in a religious subject, since Mariano Benlliure had sculpted a perfect altar boy who had dropped his censor and was sucking his burnt fingers.
A whole gallery was devoted to the series of large paintings that Joaquin Sorolla completed between 1910 and 1919 for the Spanish Society of America. They commissioned him to paint 210 square metres of panels that would fit all around their reading room. The fourteen paintings represent glimpses of different aspects of Spanish life and of different regions. They don’t cover every aspect of Spain and leave some areas out. What a fantastic commission, for a painter who loved his country and knew it well, to travel around for years sketching and painting what he must have felt would be a master work. Each of the panels is a quite separate work, and seen together, the lighting and details are all different as you would expect from a researcher painter. They are all full of people and action, and provide an ethnographic record of the times.
There are three paintings from Seville – one of dancers, another of a bullfight and another depicting a procession of penitents in pointed hoods. The Andalucian painting shows a cattle round up. A market scene represents Extremadura; tuna fishing, Ayamonte; a pilgrimage, Galicia; and a game of skittles was painted in Guipuzcoa. The Town Council of Roncal are taking themselves very seriously in Navarre, while the people of Aragon are enjoying a folk dance with abandon. A fish market scene captures Catalonia, and a pause in work in a palm grove, Elche. In the scene of riders from Valencia, Sorolla’s home town, there is a joyous carnival atmosphere and an enormous net bag of oranges is being carried along on a stick in front of some horse riders. Apparently the artist painted the scene of the bread festival from Castile to be larger than any of the others to show its political dominance in Spain, but in the end decided that all the scenes should be given equal prominence, regardless of size. This was possible because the bread festival scene is a long painting of a very ordinary topic, and there are sub groups and scenes within it. We both really enjoyed these paintings, and loved noting the details and the expressions, and learning from the portrayal of ordinary people leading their lives in a moment of time.
Apparently by the time the paintings were exhibited in 1926, Sorolla’s style had gone out of fashion, and there were those whose strict idea of art and what was acceptable meant that the poor Spanish Society was sitting on a stylistic white elephant. This is the first time that the works have been displayed in Spain, since the arbiters of artistic fashion and merit are now more inclusive. Artistic values such as beauty, form and balance are expressed in his works and the curators of the exhibition hope that Sorolla will be recognised as one of the great painters of the 20th century.
Contemporary art is always more challenging for us; we need to understand more about its development and to know why some things are famous and revered and others are not. We stood amazed in front of some abstract pieces, while others appealed to us or at least intrigued us. We were surprised by the extensive career that Picasso had as a book illustrator and fascinated that he could produce such amazing effects and suggestions with a few masterful strokes. We finished up with artworks leading us back from the first half of the nineteenth century to the 12th Century, a fascinating experience in seeing the development in skill, taste and subject in art over such a long time. We finished just as the lights were turned out behind us in the final three galleries, and were very glad that we had not rushed this wonderful gallery.
Out in the storm again, we were pleased to see that it was dark but not pouring or particularly windy, so we made it to the mall without getting too wet. I had been wearing my very fashionable plastic pants in the gallery, being too lazy to take them off, and depending on them to keep my only pair of winter pants dry.
Tonight we chose a computer work table easily in the food hall, and settled down to some typing and reading of the Lonely Planet. We didn’t even feel embarrassed to set out our own picnics on plates to eat, although we couldn’t resist buying some hot chips. Our travel plans seem to be based on heading towards the south, towards anywhere that it doesn’t rain every day and is slightly warmer.
It was late when we arrived home again, and another night of 1.30 after we had chatted and prepared for bed. Tomorrow would be Monday, the day of Museum closures, so we planned to visit the town of Guernica and to go to the beach! Were we mad?
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