Austerity Characteristic of Zuloaga Pictures in Boston

Spain has been misconceived by our ignorant tradition as much as any other country in the world. For us it has always been the land of riotous dance, gay color, tumultuous music. But in fact its hills are desolate, its color gray, the dress of its people largely black. That austerity that is only hinted at in the saddest parts of Brittany, is in Spain magnified to the dignity of a persistent vision, brooding in the colorless sky, dispelled, or rather, transformed, only for a moment in the heat of noon, intense, akin to the early Gothic. It is strain to the verge of insanity. In England, Blake's engravings have something of its spirit. It is fundamental in Spain and it is what Goya and el Greco and now Zuloaga have put in their paintings.

At the latter's exhibition in the gallery of the Copley Society on Clarendon street, I heard strange things. A pacifist and an intellectual of distinction kept insisting that every canvas was wholly "theatrical," using the word in the most disparaging sense. Now it is not to be doubted that austerity in America is a quality rare enough to appear to be "ex machina." But seeing a miracle, to suppose that there must be pullies and cardboard is to be really suspicious and of small soul. A modern scientific mind noticed the utter lack of physical relation between the figures and their backgrounds. He felt a desire to warn the Cardinal, sitting rich in his scarlet and apparently on the very top of a tower, that he was in imminent peril of being blown off like a bird's nest into the village and the hills beneath. He felt a need of lending hat and coat to "My Uncle Daniel and His Family," who stand quietly as if in a studio, hatless, fan in hand, on a hill-top while behind them the land spreads out in the distance and windy clouds swirl high. He felt indeed very witty. But he quite failed to feel that realism is entirely a matter of the effect produced and has nothing whatever to do with servile imitation of physical act. If you feel that the scarlet Cardinal and the Catholic Church represent Spain's hope and defiance of its great sadness; if you feel that the landscape behind "Uncle Daniel" is what formed both him and his family, if you feel these things, there is the reason for their existence, there the reality and there the beauty.

This bringing out of character by use of background is in writing the suggestion of mood by describing objectively a mood of nature. In painting and writing it is a very stimulating thing to do. Its danger lies in the fact that one may arrive at finding symbolism were there is only simple statement. In music it brings program pieces. I should dislike program painting.

I had almost forgotten the strangest thing I heard at the exhibition. A lady complained that all the types were alike: There was no variety, all the colors were dull, all the landscape equally mournful. Now this is actually to condemn not merely individual consistency of mood but the consistency in spirit of an entire nation throughout the ages. Did she expect Spain to cast off her mourning and giggle? Did she seek for a soda fountain in Segovia? Did she want the devil on the church steeple? If she did I call her a fool, if she did not I place her in the ranks of those who fail to recognize, calling it theatrical, that most holy thing, austerity.