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They guy who painted my avatar blew me away with that work. I've no idea if he has other flamenco oriented work. He makes an appearance with this picture in the documentary film of Nino Miguel.
If you take time to see "La Guitarra" by Julian bream, along with the music there are several hours of paintings and other images presented, not all flamenco of course, but Goya and others are discussed a bit. For sure flamenco has been a theme of many painters.
The famous painting by Sargent give her the opportunity to raise just about every problem you could imagine about representing the essence of flamenco visually. She also shows and discusses some other representations.
I have mixed feelings about “El Jaleo”. I was given a large framed copy and it hung above the piano for about 30 years before I sent on holiday to the loft because I could no longer bear looking the guitarists who to my eyes look a bit like sad puppets with toy guitars.
I have mixed feelings about “El Jaleo”. I was given a large framed copy and it hung above the piano for about 30 years before I sent on holiday to the loft because I could no longer bear looking the guitarists who to my eyes look a bit like sad puppets with toy guitars.
That's pretty much how guitars looked back then though....... And the sadness appears to me to be jondo.....I picture a big quejillo coming out of the cantaor.
RE: painters and flamenco (in reply to estebanana)
Would you care to comment on the Sevilla show?
I find it interesting that apparently he supported Mario Escudero's debut (as a bailaor) but as far as I know the two are not related. Still, ¡qué coincidencia!
Escudero's work is kind of mid century mix up of Miro, Picasso and Surrealism that is formed into an illustrational style. Not super distinguished from the several hundred other artists who did similar kinds of work derived from 20th century modern Spanish painting. But at the same time not at all unpleasing to look at. He picked up a lot of mannerisms from Picasso and Miro, but somehow manages not to let the visual cliche' get in the way of the enjoyment of the work. That maybe due his main subject of flamenco dance, I have a built in interest in his subject. If he were painting horses I would ignore his work. His connection to flamenco is the only part that keeps me interested.
He also looked at Matisse carefully enough to understand something about Matisses color, which is not that easy to do. Escudero is not what I call a rigorous painter who's work you have to be with a for a while to fully see into it, like for example Nicolas De Stael or rewards you with some kind of spiritual redemption for having looked carefully, like maybe Grunewald, but he is no slouch either. Dancing really comes through in this work because he goes straight for the direct feeling of arms and legs moving, and body arching than worrying about anatomy. He probably took that from late Matisse also. There is a big influence of Matisse paper cuts and Picasso drawings, he reconciled that into a light playful style that makes very nice posters for shows. Nothing bad about that.
That's pretty much how guitars looked back then though....... And the sadness appears to me to be jondo.....I picture a big quejillo coming out of the cantaor.
Quejillo is word I always think of as a slang for cheese fart.
Just say it ok. You were thinking it. _______________________________________________________
Were is the study on El Jaleo by the revisionist art historian you guys were talking about? I want to read it. I like taking the piss out of revisionist art historians, it is kind of a hobby of mine.
Don't allow them to quash your enjoyment of an artist or a work of art just because they need to grind axes and level colonial scores with an intellectual autopsy of a particular painting or painter. Revisionism is a buzz kill, a strange pox on art history that allows super smart nerdy people to show off self righteous indignation at history while all the time having a massive amnesia attack and forgetting that hindsight vision is 20/20.
If you like for example Gauguin or J.S. Sargent it is ok to not heed the insane rantings of a revisionist art historian who wants to deconstruct your fun at gazing into a nice picture. Revisionist art historians are like mean spirited pimps that beat up the reputations of defenseless old paintings with untwisted wire coat hangers and then turn them shamed into the streets of academia where other whore mongering academics buy them off the curb and abuse them further during office hours and in classrooms full of innocent student witnesses.
Were is the study on El Jaleo by the revisionist art historian
See the link in my first post If you're really interested PM me, and I'll mail you a copy. BTW I didn't find the author revisionist. She simply put things in a performers perspective.
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?
The artist goes by the name of "El nino de las pinturas". He has single-handedly changed the urban landscape of Granada Capital over the last 20 years. His art is everywhere, to the extent that it's almost too much at times.
Though most of his work is not flamenco-related, he has done several flamenco scenes and portraits of some of the main artists such as Paco de Lucia or, at the lower entrance to the Sacromonte, Enrique Morente.
The few times I've been back since he put up that painting, it's always had the same effect on me: a sort of "welcome back" sign on the door of the Sacromonte.
Here are a bunch of Joaquin Sorolla paintings, they all look like feria scenes. I disagree with Hiller, who wrote about Sargent, that these Sorolla pictures all look too upscale. There were probably some gypsies that made a bit of money doing flamenco and she left out the part that wealthy men hired singers for parties and some were paid good money to sing. I'll have to look further into it see what Sorolla was really looking at. This is the kind of thing that frustrate me that I don't have a real library at my disposal. If I were in San Francisco I could go to the Berkeley or Mills College libraries and research this.
Just slightly off-topic, is this footage of Dali painting to flamenco accompaniment (cante y toque), at a UN function held in late 1965 (see the notes about the date). Admittedly this is not an example of flamenco depiction so much as of flamenco inspiration. The introductory notes are more or less comprehensible.
It is at times interesting and at others amusing to watch the interplay between the performers...
Back on the subject of Vicente Escudero, I found this article in a blog - included not only for the brief introduction to the man, but also for the slide-show catalogue of his paintings:
The assertion is substantiated with discussion about Miró's friendship with Vicente Escudero (discussed above) and apparent interest in the music of Granados and de Falla.
The link may be most obvious in this Spanish Dancer painting, as it's more figurative than other paintings of Miró's . Admittedly I am not sure what to make of the cyclopean treatment of her face:
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