Ignacio Zuloaga

Ignacio Zuloaga Zabaleta (Éibar, July 26, 1870 - Madrid, October 31, 1945) was a Spanish painter, one of the most outstanding of the XX. He obtained great prizes and distinctions both nationally and internationally. Critics in Paris called him "the last great master of the Spanish School of painting."

The third of five brothers, he was the only one who dedicated himself to the arts, like his father, Plácido Zuloaga, the great damascene artist of the century XIX, his grandfather, Eusebio Zuloaga, the last harquebusier of the Royal House of Spain, and his uncles, among whom the potter Daniel Zuloaga stands out.

He trained in Kontadurekua, the tower house and family school-workshop, located in the Gipuzkoan town of Éibar. There he practiced the art of drawing, a discipline highly valued and appreciated by his mother. However, his wishes to be a painter were not approved by his parent, who expected him to study architecture.

His school training was first in Vergara with the Dominicans, and later in a Parisian boarding school run by Jesuits.

He lived halfway between Spain and France, having an active workshop in Paris, Segovia, Madrid and Zumaya.

Biography

Early Years

He was born in Éibar in 1870, into a family linked to the world of art. His grandfather, Eusebio Zuloaga González, was the last arquebusier of her Majesty and the first Spanish gunsmith to achieve international fame and prestige. In fact, he won a prize at the First International Exhibition, held in London in 1851.

Monument to Ignacio Zuloaga in Éibar, his hometown.

In 1887 he visited the National Museum of Painting and Sculpture. There he discovered the great masters of Spanish painting (El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán and Goya), whose work had a significant impact on him. In fact, he was the first to revalue the work of the Cretan artist, and he did the same with the painter from Fuendetodos.

That same year he participated in the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid, with the painting A Priest Praying in a Room, a canvas that, however, went unnoticed.

In September 1888, he sent three works to the contest organized for the Euskara Festival held in Guernica. On that occasion, the critics were very favorable and he managed to sell one of them to a British collector.

In 1889, he traveled to Rome, where he lived for six months. There he was able to admire the Renaissance artists, and his vocation to be a painter was already a fact. During this stay he painted Wounded Smith , which in 1890 he would present at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid.

From Italy he went to Paris, settling in the Montmartre neighborhood. In the French capital, he first attended the Free Academy directed by Henri Gervex and later the La Palette Academy, where he was a student of Eugène Carrière. Added to this regulated training are his constant visits to the Louvre Museum to admire and copy the work of the great masters, among whom was once again El Greco.

His Parisian social circle included Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Blanche, Emile Bernard, Paul Maurice and Máxime Dethomas, whose sister he married. As well as Spanish artists: Santiago Rusiñol, Paco Durrio, Pablo Uranga and Ramón Casas.

In the same year, 1890, he presented his work La forja at the Salon des Artistes Françaises, which received very favorable reviews. In 1891, he participated with two paintings in the inaugural exhibition of the famous and so important Parisian art gallery for young artists, owned by the dealer Le Barc de Bouteville , located on rue Le Peletier.

Around 1893 he traveled to Bilbao to found, together with other young representatives of Basque society, the Festival Society Kurding Club or El Escritorio. In addition, he participated together with Manuel Losada and Adolfo Guirard in the decoration of its walls, making the panel Sunrise , today at the Philharmonic Society of Bilbao.

Back in Paris, he settled with his Catalan artist friends (Rusiñol, Jordá and Ramón Casas) on the Île Saint-Louis. Fortune and his admiration for the work of El Greco led him to find two paintings by said painter in Paris. Not being able to acquire them, he convinced his great friend Rusiñol to do so.

In Andalusia and with the gypsy people

Zuloaga portrayed by Ramón Casas

The year 1892 is crucial in the life and work of Zuloaga. His admiration for the gypsy people, their customs, their language, their way of life... led him to visit Andalusia.

During his first stay, he settled in the town of Alcalá de Guadaira. Later he will do it in the Seville capital, where he rented a small room in a neighborhood corral, located in a popular neighborhood inhabited mainly by the Calé population. In that atmosphere, Zuloaga was happy. He soaked up all his traditions, learned calo and for a period of time tried to be a bullfighter, attending a bullfighting school as a student, years later his name appears on the poster of a bullfight in the bullring by Manuel Carmona. His work, during this time, focused on dancers, gypsies, bullfighters and all kinds of scenes full of life and joy.

However, his dire financial situation led his father to recommend him to his main patron, the English tycoon Alfred Morrison. Thus, Zuloaga moved to London and began to work making portraits of British society. There, he knows the work of James Whistler, whose style influences him. Still with some economic scarcity, he accompanies his friend Rusiñol on a trip through several Italian cities. During the month that the journey lasted, paid for by the Catalan, Zuloaga made the drawings that illustrated the articles that he wrote for the newspaper La Vanguardia.

Despite these comings and goings of residence (Andalusia, London and Paris), Zuloaga does not neglect his career as a painter and continues to present his works in the most important competitions of the moment: Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Gallery Le Barc de Bouteville; Bilbao; Exhibition of Fine Arts of Barcelona. In the one held in Barcelona, in 1896, he obtained the 2nd medal for The two friends ; and in the same, but from 1898 he achieved the first medal with Víspera de la corrida .

Castilla: Segovia and her uncle Daniel

If at the beginning of the 1890s, Ignacio Zuloaga discovered Andalusia, at the end he would do the same with Castile, and specifically with Segovia. In the Castilian city lived his uncle Daniel Zuloaga, a renowned artist and owner of a ceramics workshop.

His arrival in Segovia coincides with a tragic moment for Spain: the defeat against the United States. It was 1898, and Zuloaga settled in a land of history, of serene and deep-rooted tradition, with cold landscapes full of nobility. He rents what is known as the Casa del Crimen, and there he opens a workshop and carries out the works that will open the doors of international fame for him.

Brinton in his 1909 essay described Zuloaga's art as follows:

He personifies in extreme form the spirit of autocracy in art, the principle of absolutism so typical of his race and country. In these bold and positive paintings, there is no sign of cowardice or commitment. The works are challenging, almost despotic. They do not strive to seek sympathy, and are not afraid to be frankly antipathic... the tones are often acydic, and sometimes hard and metal surfaces. Reactionary, you can assume...

Marriage and Family

In 1899, and in Paris, he married the French Valentine Dethomas, a member of a distinguished Parisian bourgeois family and sister of his close friend Máxime, a painter like him. Witnesses at the wedding were the painter Eugene Carrière, and the musicians Isaac Albéniz and William Chaumet. In 1902 his daughter Lucía was born, and four years later his second son, Antonio.

Santiago Etxea: its creation and refuge

Caricatured by Bagaria (The Sun1918)

Following the death of their father in 1910 and due to a confrontation with the Éibar City Council over an urban matter related to Kontadurekua, the Zuloaga brothers decided to sell the tower-house. Thus, he began to look for land where he could build his new family home, which would consist of a house, a workshop and a museum. In October 1910 he acquired the marsh between the hamlet of Santiago and the sea in Zumaya.

In September 1912 construction began on his house, under the direction of the Bilbao architect Pedro Guimón. It is a Neo-Basque style building, influenced by Basque-French farmhouses. In its decoration it includes important ceramic works made by his uncle Daniel Zuloaga, as well as Andalusian bars and other pieces of French origin. It is an eclectic work. It was inaugurated on July 14, 1914.

Zuloaga Museum in Zumaya

On the night of December 24 to 25, 1921, the museum and the chapel were inaugurated, in what was once the hamlet of Santiago. The house and the museum became a place of pilgrimage for friends and admirers. Friends of any social, political or economic condition passed through there.

American tour

His first prize medal at the Barcelona Exhibition in 1898, and being named an associate member of the Salon de la Sociéte Nationale in Paris, gave Zuloaga enough strength not to give up on his dream of being a painter. He resumed his activity and began to present works, without any fear, to the public exhibitions of the moment, regardless of the country in which they were held: Barcelona, Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Rotterdam, Munich, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Budapest, Prague, Berlin., Vienna, Liège, Antwerp, London, Mexico, Rome, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires…

In 1909 he exhibited for the first time in the United States. It was at the Hispanic Society of New York, at the direct invitation of its founder and director Archer Hunttington, where he exhibited thirty-eight canvases. Between 1916 and 1917 he undertook an intense exhibition tour of the Anglo-Saxon country, showing thirty-four works in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Minneapolis.

Almost a decade later, in 1925, the prestigious Reinhardt Gallery in New York organizes an exhibition of fifty-two canvases, reaping another success in his career. This encourages him to take his work to Boston, Palm Beach and Havana. In 1926 the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid organized a monographic exhibition of his (39 paintings). His success, once again, is overwhelming, although the young artists who are already followers of the European avant-garde do not see in him a teacher to follow.

Group of people at the Zuloaga Museum in 1931, with Ramón Pérez de Ayala, Ignacio Zuloaga and Gregorio Marañón in the foreground.

In 1931 he was appointed by the Government of the Republic as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, today the Reina Sofía Art Center Museum. Position from which he immediately resigns, proposing Miguel Utrillo.

Zuloaga and Goya

Ignacio Zuloaga owned a car, and with it he toured Spain, being a pioneer in this type of travel. In fact, he was the first to arrive in Fuendetodos by car in 1903. The purpose of his arrival in the Aragonese town was to locate the birthplace of his much-admired Francisco de Goya. In 1915 he acquired it, to later restore it. In addition, he projected some schools and a monument. The latter was inaugurated in 1920.

Zuloaga during and after the Spanish Civil War

The most controversial aspect of Ignacio Zuloaga's career was his performance in favor of the Francoist side in the Civil War; an issue that received an important boost in the XXI century with the research by Javier Novo for the catalog of the exhibition «Zuloaga 1870- 1945»..

Ignacio Zuloaga was in Paris with his family at the time the uprising took place, on July 18, 1936. Regarding his ideological and political position, the American ambassador Claude Bowers wrote: «I never he had become interested in politics, although his close friends in intellectual and artistic circles were the academic republicans."

Report of Cosme Iraundegui, Franco's mayor of Zumaya, on Ignacio Zuloaga. May 1937.

After paintings were stolen from his studio in Plaza de las Vistillas in Madrid, and faced with the risk of something similar happening with the Zuloaga museum in Zumaya, the painter got the Minister of the Interior Augusto Barcia to send several militiamen of the Popular Front to guard the museum. But, given the continuous advance of the rebels towards Guipúzcoa and the alarming news that arrived, he decided to travel with his wife and son to Spain. After picking up his daughter Lucía, his son-in-law and his grandson in San Sebastián, the Zuloaga family remained in Zumaya, securing their museum. However, El Greco's painting Saint Francis Presenting the Stigmata was stolen from him.

When Franco's troops take Zumaya on September 21, the Zuloaga family did not show any kind of support for the rebels. This attitude provoked the ire of the new Francoist mayor of Zumaya, Cosme Iraundegui, who included the painter and his son-in-law on the list of reds and separatists whom he recommends fining. In November 1936, Ignacio Zuloaga's son, Antonio, was mobilized and sent to the Madrid front. That same month, the Duke of Alba, a friend of the painter, told him that the Palacio de Liria, where several of the Eibarres' paintings were, had been set on fire by the Republicans and his works had been lost.

During the winter of 1937 Zuloaga met the English Countess Kinnoull, a war photographer for the Francoists, who narrated to him the devastation of the Republicans' heritage, such as the burning of Irún, Éibar, Durango and Guernica.

The bombing of Éibar and the burning of the tower-house of the Zuloaga family, which no longer belonged to them, and which was attributed to the Republicans, made a great impression on the artist. The painter ended up positioning himself completely in favor of Franco. Bowers summed it up: "When he first visited me, he was neutral, but, very soon, living in fascist territory, and not as sensitive to the German Nazis as Unamuno, he had become a determined supporter of the fascists.".

Starting in 1938, Ignacio Zuloaga fully joined Franco's war effort, participating in exhibitions in Venice and London in favor of the insurgents and painting General Franco and other senior officials, such as Ramón Serrano Suñer and General Millán -Astray, or the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo, to which he dedicated the canvas El Alcázar en llamas (heroic landscape of Toledo) in 1938.

In a letter written in April 1939 to the collector of his paintings, Mrs. Garrett, Zuloaga stated:

Thank God, and Franco, he finally won the war and ended! And it ended, despite the wishes of the countries that are called democratic - that farce, how shameful, when these countries knew the truth of this drama! We will all work with all our forces to rebuild a new Spain (free, big and united) Spanishize Spain, and get rid of all external influences, so that we can preserve our great personality. That's my dream in art. I hate fashions (which are destructive of what has race) One must (for good or for evil) be oneself, and not imitate the style of anyone else. I'm going to dedicate the years that I have left to that end. What a shame in the future for those countries that have supported the crimes, the wild vandalism that prevailed within the Soviet clan in Spain! This has touched us all (more or less) but God will help and overcome it.

But, according to Novo, Zuloaga maintained "[...] a certain distance from the organic activity of the (Franco) regime." Novo explains that, despite the tremendous criticism that Spanish nationalism made of him during the first decades of the century, he was "[...] considered the greatest representative of what is Spanish [...] and his figure was rescued for the cause and used by the Francoist system for publicity purposes".

The broad political spectrum of the friendships that Zuloaga cultivated throughout his life, the countrymen of the commonest town mixed with the most noble ladies, seem to show that he cared more about people than about his ideas. If he portrayed Franco as a Falangist or King Alfonso XIII as a hussar, it is as if he painted a bullfighter as a bullfighter or a gypsy with a mantilla: what he saw in the character is what he represented, with no proselytizing spirit. In a letter addressed to his uncle Daniel Zuloaga dated "before September 26, 1906", he says verbatim:

When people come to believe that painting must have a political, religious, happy, sad social end; to make them laugh or cry; one shuts one's mouth; and never utters; not even the word painting; and much less art."

Works and pictorial style

The dwarf Gregorio the booth. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Zuloaga's painting was one of the most discussed due to the harshness of its drama. The expression of a realism stubborn in presenting the chronicle of the time, particularly of a Castilla in a certain way deformed by the literature of 1998, although influenced by a wide repertoire of teachers that could be headed by El Greco and Puvis de Chavannes.

He was a great fan of bullfighting, a theme he represented in his paintings, even going out into the ring on occasion. It is worth highlighting the painting Bullfight in Éibar from 1899, a work acquired by Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza that is now exhibited in the museum of her name in Malaga. In it, elements that characterize the author's work can be observed: urban landscapes of the towns of Spain, popular types, the realistic way of approaching the scenes or the influence of Goya both in the bullfighting theme, the bloody way of representing it and in the use of a dark color palette where the presence of black stands out, which links with the black paintings of the Aragonese artist. Some of his works are:

• The delivery of wine, 1900 (Museu del Cau Ferrat, Sitges)
• Celestine, 1906 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid)
• The Witches of San Millán1907 (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires).
• The dwarf Gregorio the Botero1908 (Hermitage, St. Petersburg)
• My uncle Daniel and his family, 1909 (Museum of fine Arts, Boston)
• Doña Adela Quintana Moreno1910 (Museum of Fine Arts, Bilbao)
• Maurice Barrés devant Toledo1913 (Museum d'Orsay, Paris)
• Portrait of the Countess of Noailles, 1913 (Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao)

In addition to those mentioned, many other major museums and galleries around the world preserve his work. For example:

Tributes

Monument to Ignacio Zuloaga in Madrid.

• 1912. He receives the tribute of his neighbors from Éibar.
• 1913. He's named the adoptive son of Fuendetodos.
• 1921. Member of the French Institute in the engraving section.
• 1922. He is appointed Honorary President of the Arts and Decoration Commission of the Basque Museum of Bayona.
• 1926. Ateneo Guipuzcoano.
• 1931. President of the patronate of the Museum of Modern Art, today Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
• 1947. the Town Hall of Madrid erects a monument, located in the square of Las Vistillas, work of González Quesada.
• 1947. The FNMT emits a series of postal stamps with its latest self-portrait.
• 1954. The FNMT issued a 500 ticket with the image of its last self-portrait in the verse, and View of Toledo on his back. It was in circulation until 1973.
• 2004. The Spanish aviation company Iberia baptized an Airbus 340/600 with its name.

The cities of Éibar, Bilbao and San Sebastián also erected monuments in his memory. Three museums have dedicated his name to him and there are numerous thoroughfares, educational centers and other institutions in different parts of Spain that bear his name.

Exhibitions

• 1909. Ignacio Zuloaga. The Hispanic Society of America.
• 1916-1917. Ignacio Zuloaga. New York.
• 1925. Reinhardt Gallery, New York.
• 1925. Havana.
• 1926. Circle of Fine Arts of Madrid.
• 1970. Ignacio Zuloaga. A tribute exhibition. San Sebastian.
• 1984. I. Zuloaga. Segovia.
• 1990. Ignacio Zuloaga, 1870-1945. Bilbao. Dalla. Paris. New York. Madrid.
• 2005. Ignacio Zuloaga. Gerona, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Murcia.
• 2017-2018. Zuloaga in Paris de la Belle Époque, 1889-1914. MAPFRE Foundation.
• 2018. Ignacio Zuloaga: character and emotion.
• 2019. Ignacio Zuloaga, 1870-1945, Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts.