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estebanana -> RE: painters and flamenco (Mar. 9 2016 4:53:43)
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I found it and downloaded the PDF and read it.
She was in fact quite right on about 80% of the time. I liked it for the most part, but she came to some conclusions about Sargent as a painter that were not really very solid. She said Velasquez is claimed to be a big influence on Sargent by some writers who reason that El Jaleo has a lot of Goya and Velasquez in it. She says this is more about local color and environment in a 19th century tablao then Sargent quoting Velasquez. Sargent really is a Velaquezofile in the first degree. She even shows a painting by Sargent of La Carmencita and the yellow-gold-ochre dress is pure Velasquez as in Las Meninas dress and other dresses of la infanta Margarita by Velasquez.
I could pick out about ten more such issues, but over all she did a good job refuting the observations of those claiming El Jaleo is not really flamenco. It is a great painting and a studio concoction put together with models, memories and Sargents drawings. Those kind of studio pictures always tend to be a bit fictive and a bit truth. Sargent certainly was a close observer and picked up on something more than a surface rendering of a happy feria scene. Painters before cinema were film directors of sorts and Sargent certainly used the canvas as a theatrical space, he really made a dramatized documentary of flamenco and all in all it seems to capture the spirit and most of the facts about flamenco at the time.
Hiller could have been more specific about when a where women began doing footwork in flamenco and a few other points, but I can't get pissy about revisionism and axe grindng because she really defended Sargents observations. I would have said several points differently or laid them out better, but is probably becasue flamenco afcionados don't often agree on things rather than a fault in her concept.
She also cited Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla who I was going to also mention. Not to get too far into it she got Sargent's and Sorolla's intentions mixed up/ Sorolla was making paintings for upper class patronage and he did depict a real part of flamenco, the part of feria and Sevillanas dresses and casetas etc. There is not reason to discredit that as non flamenco. To talk about it would be like talking about Cante Andaluz vs. Cante Gitano Andaluz- even though Sargent did bang up job of painting the grittier side of flamenco he, Sargent, was still an upper class tourist in the same social class as Sorolla. Both of them told a truth ad both of them invented some of it. The stuff of art;who said it was in the rule book to be literal about showing a dancer?
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