Curator Arrives, Picasso, El Greco in Tow

SEVILLE, Spain —When Carmen Giménez, now the curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum, was growing up in Morocco in the 1950s, she dreamed of Spain the way other children dream of Never Never Land. Ms. Giménez’s socialist parents left Spain after the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, refusing to live under the dictator Francisco Franco.“Living in exile made me especially romantic about my own country,” Ms Giménez said during lunch here in September. “When I finally came to Spain in my teens, I could feel the country’s energy. It was thrilling to be Spanish.”Now based in Madrid, Ms. Giménez works as an independent curator for museums all over the world. And as a curator of the exhibition “Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History,” opening next Friday at the Guggenheim, she brings pieces of Spain to New York.Ms. Giménez talks as excitedly and precisely about her past as she does about art. She was in town to visit curators at the Museo de Bellas Artes, from which she had borrowed paintings by Murillo and Zurbarán for the Guggenheim show.The exhibition, which she curated with the Spanish art historian Francisco Calvo Serraller (known to friends as Paco), includes 138 works, spanning five centuries of Spanish painting, including 15 works from the collection of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. She arrived in New York two weeks ago to oversee the installation.“Everyone has a different idea as to how to hang paintings,” Ms. Giménez said in Seville. “The Prado hangs high. Picasso said to hang low. I am accustomed to the geometry of the Guggenheim so that’s what I take into account, not the height.”Among the outstanding works in the show are El Greco’s “The Vision of St. John,” Miró’s “The Table (Still Life With Rabbit),” Dalí’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, One Second Before Awakening,” Goya’s “The Duchess of Alba,” and Picasso’s “The Infanta Margarita María From The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas), After Velázquez.”They will be grouped thematically, rather than chronologically, so that, as Ms. Giménez explains it, viewers can compare how the painters treated similar subjects through the ages.“Carmen is the greatest ambassador of Spanish culture today,”the president of the board of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens, said recently. He appointed Ms. Giménez curator of 20th-century art when he became the museum’s director in 1988. “She and Paco Serraller have gathered a feast of Spanish painting of the last 400 years. This isn’t just a collection of great works from the Prado. They come from all over the world, from the Hermitage, the Hispanic Society of America in New York, the Tate, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many other museums and private collections.”Mr. Krens first approached Ms. Giménez in 1999 about doing a show on Velázquez and Spanish painting but she had other ideas. “Carmen created something far more illuminating,” he said, “an exhibition built around themes which have particularly resonated in Spain: portraits of gentlemen, nudes, crucifixions, and children. This show gives us an opportunity to see them in an original context. She knew where to find the surprises. Some from provincial collections had never traveled before. She convinced curators to lend them. She never gives up. She’s like that hitter cherished by baseball team managers: She always delivers.”Ms. Giménez’s curatorial résumé is formidable. She suggested that the Guggenheim establish a satellite museum in Spain and helped establish it in Bilbao in 1989. She initiated the idea for the Picasso Museum in Malaga in Southern Spain in 2003, of which she is the director. At the Guggenheim and other museums, she has curated major exhibitions of Brancusi, Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Richard Serra, as well as Spanish masters. The Spanish government awarded her the prestigious Gold Medal of Fine Arts in 2003.When Ms. Giménez arrived in Madrid in the late 1960s, after earning advanced degrees in political science and art history from the Université de Paris and the École du Louvre in Paris, there were no women in influential positions in Spanish artistic circles. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to work at a Spanish museum,” she said.”I’d have to be an independent curator.” She encountered more prejudice when she and her husband divorced in the early 1970s.”It was hardest on my daughter,” she said. “She felt it at school. At that time, a divorced woman could be put in jail.”Still, in 1983 Ms. Giménez was appointed executive adviser to the Spanish Minister of Culture. Over the next six years, she made her mark by arranging international exhibitions of works in the Madrid museums, proposing the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía — now one of the world’s most important centers of contemporary art — and promoting young Spanish artists internationally. She began concentrating on 20th-century Spanish art, with Picasso eventually as her focus.Ms. Giménez put everything she knows about Spanish art and history into the new exhibition at the Guggenheim. “Spain has a peculiar history,” she said. “It was isolated from Europe from the time of El Greco to Goya. The artists tended to feed on its past. Even Velázquez, who traveled, would return to old traditions when he went home. But Spanish art began to look very modern by the 19th century. Outsiders identified certain characteristics as Spanish: realism that was almost expressionistic, a range of colors dominated by black, an interest in the gruesome, and near religious fanaticism. There was another kind of isolation in the 20th century. Picasso, Gris, Miró, Dalí, and Julio González were all political exiles.”To convince curators to loan their masterpieces to the show, she traveled to Paris and St. Petersburg, Rusia — and to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee.“People are sometimes surprised at the great works that are in smaller museums,” she said. “If I don’t meet with the curators, they might not want to make the loans. I had to convince some of them that this is a major occasion and that the transportation and security would be first-rate.”In the process of determining what to include, Ms. Giménez discovered new, subtle connections among Spanish works over the centuries. “I took small images of all the paintings that Paco and I wanted in the show and laid them out on the floor like cards,” she said. “Looking at them that way, altogether, I saw certain consistent themes. That’s not to say other nationalities didn’t paint some of the same subjects, but only that the Spanish appeared to share an unusual predilection for certain ones. These themes — we call them chapters in the exhibition — in fact were a particularly enlightening way to look at the paintings. We recognized something that could be called ‘Spanishness’ that we found fascinating. I hope others will, too.”

Curator Arrives, Picasso, El Greco in Tow

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