The romantic landscape as a self-portrait at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum

It is rare, in the usually repetitive agendas of museums and exhibition halls across the country, to find art from the 19th century, if not from its final decades, with Impressionism already dancing. And it seems to me that it is a mistake to omit it because, although it is true that the most stereotypical works can tire us today, it is also true that in that century modern sensibility was forged, in all its complexity, and that it is essential to know this process. This small exhibition shows us how innovations can surprise us and how the breath of artists almost lost in time can reach us.

get together Eugene Lucas with two Norwegian landscapers may seem whimsical at first. And it is, because those invited to support the idea you want to highlight could have been others, from other latitudes and, above all, more. But this “brushstroke” was designed with so much appreciation for the works and their creators and so much support from the organizers, which are the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, the Stavanger Kunstmuseum and the Nordic Institute of Art, that manages to outline a community plausible creative.

Although the three artists were contemporaries, Peter Balke (1804-1887), lars hertervig (1830-1902) and Eugenio Lucas (1817-1870) never met. They all worked in those central decades of the 19th century, when a late romanticism developed in several European countries, from which the three draw, and the tyranny of gyms takes over. The public at exhibitions and critics place art in the social sphere, and the bourgeois market, from which Lucas and, at one time, Balke benefited, imposes its rules. But they occupy another creative and secret dimension.

The landscape genre was in the 19th century a modern vehicle. And, in these authors, we verified the extent to which it lent itself to experimentation. We are not talking here about a topographic landscape that represents places; it is more a landscape than a self-portrait. And I would say this with a great self-awareness of his exploratory tenacity.

Almost no one, at the time, saw all these works on display. Lucas was a successful painter, but while he was selling his Goya scenes, he produced these almost abstract expressionist gouaches, which he showed only to colleagues and friends. Balke did some tours in Europe, but in his country he was despised and already At the age of 45 he left the artistic scene, continuing with his freer work in solitude. Hertervig suffered from mental problems, lived in an asylum, was declared “insanely incurable” and disabled, and ended his days in poverty, without ever abandoning drawing.

Almost no one, at the time, saw all these works on display. Lucas only showed them to colleagues and friends

The Far North lent itself to internalization because it was already an idea. This reminds us Knut Ljøgodtcurator of the exhibition together with Carlos Sanchezthat Dr. Frankenstein's monster is seen, in the novel by Shellyin the sea of ice – the one who painted Friedrich without having seen – during an expedition to the Arctic, this terror manifests itself as emptiness, in A Descent into Maelström by Putin the Lofoten archipelago, and that Jane Eyrein the narrative of bronteimagine those “realms of ghastly whiteness”, “infested with shadows”.

[Rüdiger Safranski: “At the beginning, romanticism was a movement of leftists”]

Balke wanted to see them and step foot in them, so he undertook a trip in 1832 to northern Scandinavia that forever marked his landscape imagination. After some years under the influence of Friedrich - he was a disciple of Johan Christian Dahl in Dresden – formula a whitish and ethereal visionwith something of Japaneseism, one of those places that, in their years of seclusion, radically blacken and condense into minimal tables with a very personal scraping technique.

Hertervig was inspired by the landscape of his childhood on the island of Borgøy to create a vocabulary of mountains, trees, rocks, clouds and water, in tune with German romanticism and with echoes of Norwegian romanticism. August cappelen. I repeat this they are not so much places as expressions of mood, described with those, we could say, pictograms that are at the same time particular and universal. But perhaps the most innovative is the use of reused paper – there are some made from tobacco, with its marks visible – and artisans whose textures are incorporated into this language of the soul, of great essentialism and indisputable sincerity.

Meanwhile, in southern Europe, Lucas gave himself up a more formalistic and modern exercise to the maximum, with the landscape as an excuse. He had touched on the genre, in drawings or paintings with an orientalist theme -one is included, which barely fits into the whole-, but it is in the last twenty years of his life that he makes one of the greatest developments in the dot composition procedure that he described Alexandre Cozens at the end of the 18th century, based on Chinese painting.

I think just Victor Hugo did something comparable. And we will have to wait several decades to find similar technical daring in Spanish art. His is a dark, fanciful vision of a nature that is falling apart. And then it connects with the Norse: in a landscape that blurs and reconfigures itself in memorywhich is seen to be inhabited only by those who carry it inside.

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