The Queen Sofía Spanish Institute has a knack for dragging out of obscurity the least known painters of the Iberian Peninsula. In some cases, such as the exhibition of Ignacio Zuloaga nearly two decades back, the results were a revelation. Other shows were less spectacular.

The Institute’s latest offering displays the works of Salvador Tuset Tuset (1883–1951). Unfortunately, Tuset is simply not a great or an important artist. But what redeems this show is that, on occasion, he can be quite good, and that, even when he falls short, the prospect of seeing a retrospective of an almost unknown artist of nearly a century past can only sharpen and excite the critical faculties of anyone who possesses them.

Like his teacher, Joaquín Sorolla, Tuset consecrated his career to something along the lines of Impressionism. Now this movement had once been, of course, a radical departure from the mainstream of art history. But by the time Sorolla and Tuset got to it, it had become almost an academic style, purged of all of its earlier fervor and daring. Sorolla, for all his banalities, could occasionally burst through to something like greatness by the sheer vigor and enchantment of his vision. In Tuset — or a least in the 30 paintings on view at the Institute — this never happens.

The work on display spans nearly half a century, and the earlier they were painted, the better they tend to be. Tuset tried his hand at a number of genres, among them landscapes, portraiture, and domestic interiors. If he is known for anything, it is the interiors, even though his landscapes represent his best work.

Indeed, the finest painting in the entire show is his depiction of Ibiza, from 1930. Everything works in this sleepy scene of a side-street on one of the smaller Balearic Islands. Compositional subtlety, the chromatic harmony of its halftone blues, beiges, and grays, and the rich tactility of the paint all create an effect that is as satisfying as what Giorgio Morandi achieved in his spectral depictions of bottles.

Slightly more typical of the artist, however, is “Alqueria del Pi,” painted seven years later. This depiction of an open field is also satisfying texturally, especially at that point on the horizon where the landscape intersects with the whitish sky. But the composition is a little weak, and the perspectival recession is impeded by the weight of the foreground.

In the majority of cases, however, Tuset seems to be going through the motions of Impressionism, but without appreciating that intuitive formal rigor and those flashes of epiphanic insight that constitute the greatness of that style, without which it promptly descends into banality. And so it is that “Jardín” (1914), with its renderings of statuary in an elegant and high-walled garden, can offer no pleasure due to its flat and inert textures. As with so much third-tier impressionism, one is left with the pictorial equivalent of mumbling, rather than that evocative indeterminacy that the style aspired to and achieved at its best.

Regarding figural painting, the show opens with two of Tuset’s largest and most ambitious canvases, “The Musicians” (1911) and “Women’s Concert” (1914). These are pleasant enough works, somewhere between Impressionism and academic art. The men depicted in “The Musicians” are cloaked in Courbet-like obscurity, which the French artist, ironically, took from a Spaniard, Velázquez, whose spirit haunts the composition as well as some of the gaunt faces. “Women’s Concert,” by contrast, is far lighter. There is nothing gritty about its harpists and violinists, as there was in the earlier work, and Tuset seems to have abandoned any interest in embodying here the “Painter of Modern Life.”

Tuset’s portraits, for all the flashiness of their brushwork, rarely yield insights about the character of his sitters. With his “Priest” (1927) it is hard to say whether the artist felt he had even finished the work or simply abandoned it with a perfunctory dash. One welcome moment of clarity, however, comes in “Wife and First Daughter” (1913). The depiction of the high-collared mother is no better than that of the priest, but the head of the infant has a compelling lucidity to it that seems especially Iberian. You find equivalents in Zuloaga and Sorolla at their best, but also intimations of this quality going back through Goya to Velázquez.

The domestic interiors make up perhaps the weakest part of Tuset’s oeuvre, even though they seem to be prized above the rest of it. But if one stands back and looks at Tuset’s career, it is possible to view it in a way that transcends criticism. The feelings, the moods, the preoccupations of the age, and the country in which he lived interacted with art history to produce his specific vision. In the early part of the 20th century, Spain, simply by being Spain, had its enchantments, and these enchantments go some ways to redeeming his art, if redemption is needed.

jgardner@nysun.com

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