Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity in Spain. The Time of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850–1870) (review)

By the mid-1850s, Spanish artists, politicians and administrators had acquired enough support to create the Exposiciones Nacionales of fine arts. These biennial, state-funded exhibitions celebrated in Madrid would remain up to the century's end the most significant sites for the criticism and display of Spanish arts. The Spanish painter Eugenio Lucas Velázquez distanced himself from the commercial benefits of these shows. Although he was a sought-after private portraitist and decorative painter, and well received at the court of Queen Isabel II, Lucas left scholars little by which to document his life or career. Andrew Ginger's new book considers the life of this successful artist who left barely a footprint on Spain's art historical terrain. Ginger should be credited for shedding a great deal of light on such an enigmatic figure, and one who has been relegated in scholarship to simply one facet of Spanish costumbrismo painting. The author's ideas are engaging; the book, however, shows the challenges of working on an artist with so little extant documentation.

Ginger explains Lucas's lack of notoriety: his connections at court and popularity with private patrons freed him from dependence on the national salons. More importantly, he was seen as an outsider and from the old guard at a time of stylistic shifts from the Romantic fantasy landscapes of his mentor Jenaro Pérez Villaamil to the naturalism taught by the Belgian Carlos de Haes. If Lucas was absent from the centres of art critical debates in Spain, it was also because he was an artist 'at odds with the fundamental tenets of his time', and a 'painter whose artistry lay not least in his frequent refusal to be what was understood as an artist' (57).

This fairly standard modernist reading of the outsider fighting for artistic independence leads Ginger to a paradox. On the one hand, he sees Lucas as 'the invisible man of mid nineteenth-century critical discourse', an artist 'who slips through the net of history', while on the other, he asks us to understand Lucas as a 'major social figure' (57) and as the central subject of a study on major shifts in the visual arts of mid nineteenth-century Spain. At one moment Lucas is the radical artist whose work is at odds with both a 'canonical modernist tradition' and contemporary understandings of Velázquez and Goya (71, 131). At the next, he is 'no rebel', but a 'complex figure' at the heart of Madrid's elite life, and an artist engaging 'directly with the very core' of mainstream discussions (316–17, 181–82). Exhuming less-studied figures is a worthwhile project. The difficulty is how to reconcile Ginger's characterization of the artist as atypical and paradigmatic; a 'curious combination of integration' and 'nonexistent critical status' (53) that Ginger sees stemming from what and for whom Lucas painted. Part of the confusion regarding Lucas as an artistic and/or social radical lies in Ginger's terms for the artist's patronage milieu: the liberal elite (25), social elite (36), cultural elite (42), social and cultural elite (54), and (using Jesús Cruz's term) the 'renewed elite' (39).

Nonetheless, Ginger's contribution is to show Lucas convincingly to be far more complex and interesting than has previously been acknowledged. Borrowing from José Manuel Arnáiz's 1981 monograph, Ginger argues that pastiche is key to an understanding of the artist: There is Lucas in the guise of Goya, as Velázquez, as a Dutch seventeenth-century painter, and as the nineteenth-century genre painter Leonardo Alenza. For Ginger, there is no single painterly identity in Lucas, but rather a striking ability to adopt the stylistic personae of 'historical others' (59). An understanding of Lucas's pastiche is ultimately necessary for an examination of the 'emergence of cultural modernity in...