ideas

Sorolla. Splendor and Theology of White.

Today, it seems somewhat outdated to talk about Joaquín Sorolla, the great Valencian painter, but I have always resisted seeing him as an old-fashioned, impressionist, and luminist painter, and nothing more. Nothing could be further from the truth; Sorolla is one of the greats, a titan, a colossus of painting. Perhaps I wouldn't equate him to a Velázquez or a Picasso, as that would be too bold, but I do see him on the same level as a Cezanne or a Manet. It is true that the work of the Valencian is very uneven in terms of quality and has been paying for this discontinuity for decades, so very few people know how to rescue from his paintings those canvases that catapult him to Olympus: Sorolla's white canvases. I don't know if they have ever been called that, or if it's entirely accurate, but that's how I feel. The critics of his art, those who denigrate and condemn him, do so based on a supposed "coloring" that is lacking and overly sweet, which in truth does not exist in his painting. I've spent my whole life going to his museum-house, on Martínez Campos street in Madrid. I've been going since I was a child, again and again, and I always left feeling spurred on by the powerful and overwhelming dominance not only of the drawing and execution, of the grace and talent, but above all by the category and class of his color, and specifically by the subtlest harmonies of the whites; wonderful modulations that are impossible to find in almost any painter. Sorolla is not a colorist. Just go to his museum to see how the color disappears and everything is based on delicate browns and grays that are masterfully lit and colored by the exact and mythical presence of white. Any painter knows the extreme difficulty of handling this color, a color that we learn is the sum of all colors, a color that becomes dull by mixing with any other, an uncomfortable color that doesn't allow for mistakes, that highlights any error in the rest, a color that gets dirty at the slightest touch because it moves in a very narrow tonal range, which requires removing any excess from the painting... Ah, but what mastery and control the Spanish painter has over this terrible color, what brutal control. In him, the whites are always white, and this is where the difficulty lies, the white is absolutely white - even when it's not, because they are actually grays - both in the shadows and in the most pronounced lights: always white, the splendor of white. I don't know of any painter who dominates this art in the same way as he does, the art of white. All the impressionists, all the Baroque, all the Fauvism, all the naturalism I know never managed to control these modulations to the degree that Sorolla did. If someone wants to learn about white, if they want to understand how this elusive color works, if they just want to give themselves a treat of white, then they should go see Sorolla. But there's more, Sorolla's whites are of a staggering modernity, they are drying with a richness and a crust in their layer that will carry the master's work to the heights of modernity. What a pity that we're stuck observing only his discourse on the sea, his so-called costumbrism, the heavy lecture that they've been imposing on us about his luminism, his regionalism. Sorolla is far beyond all that, as his career advanced, he imposed larger white masses in his paintings, removing the sea, removing the sun - so to speak - and adding white. At the end of his life, he painted prodigious canvases - which, apart from being masterful lessons in drawing, portraiture, landscape, and technique - are authentic symphonies of whites and greens, of whites and purples. The paintings of gardens that we can see in his house are unbeatable; here, the whites of lime and salt compete with the refined, nacreous whites of Velázquez and those other contemporary, rustic, and burlap whites of the great Manolo Millares.
I don't know the enormous painting "Sewing the sail" but I dare to think that it is the greatest homage that any painter has made to this color: a vast white expanse that occupies almost the entire painting, a disheveled white sail spread out in such a way that even without seeing it, I dare to say that it is the theology of white.
Let no one go looking for originality in Sorolla, nor daring concepts, nor innovations for the History of Art. No, they won't find any of that. They will only see the total splendor of white.

  José Manuel Merello 2006