A Poetics of Time and Space: Ekphrasis and the Modern Vision in Azorin and Velazquez

In 1917 José Ortega y Gasset observed that José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín) was at his best when writing with a rare book, the memory of an architectural monument, a deceased historical personage, or tarnished painting before him (2:164). Critics have long appreciated Azorín’s literary intertextuality and his ability, in Harold Bloom’s sense of the word, to “veer” away from a precursor text (always scrupulously identified), in order to create a thoroughly original work of his own. While commentary on the influence of painting on Azorín, his literary allusions to historical and fictional works of art, and the painterly quality of his prose have become topoi in the critical canon, a thorough study of the extent to which the visual arts constitute the “other” text which informs and contextualizes Azorín’s thematics, style, and the structure of individual works is still to be had. ¹

In his Memorias inmemoriales Azorín tells us that he never thought of himself as a writer, but rather as a painter, and that when he sat at the typewriter, he imagined himself with palette and brush in hand (8:441). In point of fact, Azorín had a wide-ranging knowledge of the visual arts, and wrote critically on both classic and contemporary art forms; he was an inveterate visitor of museums, well-versed in the history and theory of art, and he counted among his personal friends the contemporary painters Zuloaga, Beruete, and Vázquez Díaz. It is commonplace to attribute to Azorín, and especially to Baroja, the modern rehabilitation of El Greco whose portrait of the Caballero de la mano al pecho became an iconographic symbol of the Spanish Generation of 1898: reproductions of the painting graced the studies of many of its members. However, according to Gaspar Gómez de la Serna, the name of Velázquez, the other Spanish classical painter of note, is practically absent from the literature of the Generation (42). Gómez de la Serna attributes this neglect of Velázquez to the unbridgeable spiritual gulf between the “aesthetes” of the Generation of 1898 who identified more easily with the refined and elegant distortions of El Greco than with the human realism of Velázquez (43). Velázquez’s name is likewise absent from Antonio Risco’s list of painters favored by Azorín (240), the member of the Generation of 1898 most consistently attuned to the visual arts throughout a career that spanned nearly 70 years. The truth of the matter, however, is quite different from what Gómez de la Serna, and others, would have us believe. It is my intent to dispel the notion that Velázquez had no appeal for the Generation of 1898 and to query the intellectual and aesthetic interstices which account for Azorín inferring in Velázquez a kindred spirit. Through his absorption with Velazquean techniques that today we have come to identify as modern concepts of representation, Azorín, anticipating Ortega and Foucault, saw in the master’s work a contemporary phenomenology of vision. I will consider the story “La casa cerrada” (Castilla) as an example of the way in which Azorín engages a painting by Velázquez in dialogue, utilizing the work of art as a visual referent for what is, in reality, an essay that interrogates the dialectical relations between word and image, and the displacement of painting, an art of natural signs, by literature, an art of arbitrary, linguistic signs, in the creation of visual reality. In so doing, Azorín gives the traditional topos of ekphrasis a decidedly modern turn by asserting the priority and supremacy of language.

The year 1899 coincided with the third centenary of Velázquez’s birth, commemorated in Spain by the organization of a “Sala Velázquez” at the Prado Museum, and the publication in France of the first modern catalogue raisonné of the master’s work by Aureliano de Beruete, a landscape painter who, in addition to supervising the Velázquez activities at...