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NA visit to the Prado these days is complete without going to the 12th floor of the museum in Madrid, where Diego Velázquez, a five-year-old princess and a sleeping mastiff look down. a large canvas of Las Meninas.
Two hundred years ago, however, the newly founded museum did not exist Las Meninas, but a great symbolic work that wanted to remind the Spanish people of their fierce opposition to Napoleon’s rule and their loyalty to King Ferdinand VII.
Illustrated by Joseph Aparicio in 1818, A year of famine in Madrid (Year of Famine in Madrid), shows a group of emaciated, dying madrileños refusing the bread offered to them by the French soldiers. By choosing death over the aid of the inhabitants – even as their children perish and begin to gnaw cabbage stalks – they show true, if eternal, patriotism.
Although the painting was a major tourist attraction during the decades of the Prado’s existence, it eventually fell into political and aesthetic disrepair and was banished to the museum. Today, after more than 150 years of itinerant slavery that has included visits to the public service, the senate building and a museum in Madrid, the Year of Hunger in Madrid has come home.
Canvas has been chosen as the opening project a new series of shows called A Work, a Storywhich aims to help visitors to think about the paintings in many pictures. The idea, in the words of the director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, is to “encourage the viewer to look at a work that, aside from its aesthetics, helps us imagine aspects of history that are often unknown”.
In the context of the Year of Famine in Madrid, visitors are invited to consider the appeal of the picture, its social and political nature, its relationship with the Prado over the years, and how Francisco Goya depicts the suffering of ordinary people from the past to cover Aparicio’s canvas. By the late 1800s, it had become mainstream and a slur.
“The importance of this image was great, as well as the extent of its fall,” said Celia Guilarte Calderón de la Barca, one of the curators of the exhibition. “There is no middle ground here; it is from one land to another.”
The history of the painting, he added, “was in sync” with the political and artistic changes in Spain.
Aparicio, who was Ferdinand’s court painter, thought of the Year of Famine in Madrid as a way of encouraging the recently restored king to the hearts of the people – hence the message found on one of the pillars in the background: “Nothing without Fernando” (“Nothing without Ferdinand”).
His naked patriotic views, combined with his respect for the bravery of the people of Madrid, became an instant success. Indeed it was given pride of place in the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture, founded by Ferdinand and then became Pradoit didn’t hurt anymore.
“Aparicio’s art – and he was brilliant and brilliant in that way – was connecting with the pain of the whole city of Madrid, where the painting was meant to be,” said Carlos G Navarro, curator of the exhibition.
“If you look back at the archives, you see that people come to the museum not to see the Raphael paintings that are hanging there, or to see Las Meninas, but to see the Year of Hunger,” Navarro said.
But by the end of the 1860s, Ferdinand’s absolutist rule had ended for thirty years, Spain was on the verge of declaring its first sovereign state, and the Prado’s current director, artist Antonio Gisbert Pérez, was not a fan of Aparicio’s work.
Unlike The Year of Famine in Madrid, Gisbert’s famous painting is The Massacre of Torrijos and His Friends on the Beach in Málagawhich honors the bravery of the general who led his troops against Ferdinand’s tyranny.
“As the years go by, (Aparicio’s) painting loses its meaning and becomes a joke, an absurd joke – just like anyone who likes to paint that picture more than any other in the museum,” Navarro said. Evidence that Aparicio’s career history fell short 1879 book which it said could be used as a taste test. “According to the book, the first clue to identify a shy person is that he likes to go to the Prado to admire Aparicio’s paintings,” added Navarro.
The picture long-term exile it began in 1874. A century and a half later, Goya’s works – based on his experiences of witnessing the brutality of the French conquest – have become the most famous testimony of that time.
But it wasn’t always like that. “Back then, the Year of the Famine in Madrid was one of the modern art,” said Navarro. “It represented more modernity than Goya, who, in his time, was seen as an artist who followed the traditions of the common people.”
Administrators say the new initiative is not designed to boost Aparicio’s popularity or right the wrongs of the past. The hope is that it will make people think about how taste, politics and issues change over time. The Year of Famine in Madrid is part of a series of political and controversial Spanish paintings that go from Goya’s The Third of May 1808, through Aparicio to Gisbert’s The Execution of Torrijos, to Picasso’s Guernica.
Although Aparicio did not achieve the lasting fame that Picasso achieved with his cry against war, The Year of Hunger in Madrid is still a fascinating story.
“This is a project that went from the peak of history to being turned into a corridor of little importance,” Navarro said. “It shows well the journeys of taste and how our concept of taste, which we think is acceptable and unchangeable, changes with each generation that looks at art.”
