Por Ismael Buendia 
The Minister of Culture and Sports, Patricia del Pozo, has inaugurated the exhibition ‘Rusiñol and the Alhambra. The awakening of the painter poet’, which can be seen in the temporary exhibition hall of the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada, in the Palace of Carlos V, until September 14th. The event was also attended by the Deputy Minister of Culture, Macarena O’Neill.
Curated by art historian Mercedes Palau-Ribes O’Callaghan and the head of the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the National Art Museum of Catalonia, Francesc Quílez Corell, it brings together a hundred works, including paintings, drawings, posters, photographs, books, letters, and other documents, that testify to the influence that Granada and the Alhambra had on the work of the painter and writer Santiago Rusiñol (Barcelona, 1861-Aranjuez, 1931), as well as his contribution to the configuration of a new aesthetic paradigm.
With this great exhibition, Granada «pays tribute to the artist who felt fascination for the city, while settling a historical debt contracted with him since he began to frequent the city in search of a new pictorial language,» stated the Minister of Culture and Sports. A tribute that comes in the form of a retrospective exhibition, «thanks to the loans from 61 collections, 38 private and 23 institutional, since Granada, despite its undeniable connection with the painter, holds a small number of his works,» Del Pozo assured.
This is, in the words of the head of Culture of the Andalusian government, «a unique opportunity» to approach the painter, who found in Granada «a motif, the Nasrid garden, as well as a new language that ultimately led to his consecration.» His representation is far from the romantic and picturesque stereotype, so common in many artists of his time. An innovative vision that, therefore, «helped to resignify the image of the Alhambra and Granada, leading it down the path of the vanguards,» Del Pozo concluded.
130 years of the journey that changed everything
Highly influenced by Mariano Fortuny, Santiago Rusiñol, like several members of the Catalan painting school, showed a great attraction to the Nasrid monument and the city of Granada. So much so that the painter, a member of a family of the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie, spent five extended stays in Granada, between 1887 and 1922. However, it was his trip to Granada 130 years ago, in 1895, that marked a definitive milestone in his career. At that time, this painter, who had already trained in Barcelona, Paris, and Rome, discovered in Granada the definitive theme of his painting: the garden, which allowed him to bypass the orientalist and stereotypical preeminence cultivated by many of his contemporaries.
«His work came to vindicate the most ignored face of the Alhambra, rescuing the prominence of spaces that had remained eclipsed, valuing the principle of transience and opening new aesthetic horizons,» the exhibition curators point out, insisting that Rusiñol’s work contributed to «resignifying the image of the Alhambra and, by extension, the entire city of Granada.»
Most of the works in the exhibition dedicated to this painter and writer are from Rusiñol himself, but there are also pieces from several of his contemporaries, such as Sorolla, Ramón Casas, Picasso, Anglada Camarasa, Macari Oller, Ramón Pichot Girones, and Miquel Carbonell i Selva, among others, who help contextualize his work.
Structured in six sections, the exhibition delves into his early Andalusian works, still marked by quaintness, highlighting his work ‘Gypsy of the Albaicín’, from the Sitges Museum. It then addresses the image of Granada and the Alhambra in his painting, reflecting his vision of spaces like the courtyards of the Alberca, Lindaraja, and the Sultana, as well as the upper gardens of the Generalife.
After focusing on his interpretation of gardens as a reflection of moods influenced by the passage of time, the exhibition offers a journey through another of his main pictorial motifs: landscapes, composed by Rusiñol in an innovative, almost scenographic way, thanks to his use of photography.
Likewise, the exhibition provides an approach to the album ‘Jardins d’Espanya’, which in its first edition in 1903 included 40 photoengravings of paintings by Santiago Rusiñol, accompanied by poems and prose in Catalan. The edition was expanded in 1914, including texts by authors in Spanish of the caliber of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Manuel Machado, María Lejárraga or Ramón Pérez de Ayala. Finally, the section dedicated to the legend of the artist gathers multiple photographic and even caricature images of Santiago Rusiñol himself, one of the most portrayed personalities of his time.
The exhibition is part of the work promoted by the Alhambra Patronage, which studies the monument as a source of inspiration for writers, thinkers, and artists of the past and present.
Among the 61 lenders who have made this exhibition possible are three institutions from Granada: the Manuel de Falla Archive, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Archive and Library of the Alhambra. Also lending were several Catalan centers, such as the Mas Archive of the Amatller Institute of Photographic Art, the Library of Catalonia, the Cau Ferrat Museum in Sitges, the Víctor Balaguer Museum Library, the Photographic Archive of Barcelona, the Santiago Rusiñol Public Library, the MNAC, the Girona Art Museum, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Government of Catalonia, and the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona.
Likewise, the exhibition brings together canvases and documents loaned by museums and collections from other Spanish provinces, such as the Zaragoza Provincial Museum, the Sorolla Museum, the Reina Sofía National Art Museum, the Banco Santander Collection, the Fine Arts Museum of Játiva, the Birthplace Museum of Jovellanos, the Contemporary Art Museum of Palma, along with the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, owner of the painting ‘The Fountain of Apollo in Aranjuez’, an oil painting that belonged to Mussolini and is exhibited in Spain for the first time.
Rusiñol’s oil painting The fountain of Apollo never belonged to Mussolini. This painting was bought by the Italian State in 1911 at an International Art Exhibition in Rome. It has belonged to the Galleria Nazionalle d’Arte Moderna in Rome since then.