Bilbao, 18th September – Bellas Artes

Images from Bilbao


Everyone I’d met in the Basque country told me with great conviction that Bellas Artes, Bilbao’s “other” art museum, contains more interesting art than the Guggenheim. So I started there, in an unimpressive cubical building, a short walk from Frank Gehry’s looming and irresistible titanium ship.

What a classic museum like Bellas Artes presents is an insight into change over the centuries. I began with a special exhibit of 19th century painters and sculptors, particularly Spanish. These captured the ordinary life, and life was hard…working in fields and factories, kitchens and washrooms. The facial expressions were joyless, worn down by work. Even paintings of mothers with their children seemed sad, probably because the woman had a series of miscarriages and infant deaths. A few sculptures and paintings portrayed fabled romances, like Tristan and Isolde and Samson and Delilah -- the tragedy of passionate love. There was no happiness, that being, I’ve often been told, a “modern concept,” albeit still an elusive one in spite of – or perhaps because of – our elevated expectations.

In another temporary exhibit, of 20th art, I was enlightened to the fact that many Spanish artists created in cubist, surrealist ad abstract styles, not just the renowned like Picasso, Miro, Dali (all represented in this show), which is why such styles are considered “movements” (duh!). I saw an image of a cubist cow in a 1920’s painting that was exactly the same as Picasso’s tortured cow in “Guernika”, painted a decade later. Plagiarism, or influence, becomes apparent in such an exhibit.

As my purse had to be checked in at the reception desk, I did not have a pen and paper by which to make notes and therefore cannot recall specifics, but I was struck that in this era there were no representations, no effort to capture life as it is lived externally but, rather internally…in the abstract, the deconstructed, the provocative. But mostly, the swiggles and splashes of color seemed self-indulgent to me, without any concern for the viewer, for communication; except to express that the world is confusing and only the individual alone has significance.

I drank a café con leche on the patio, within the pleasant adjoining park, and wondered about new art: Was anyone expressing the connection between people, the possibilities of our post-modern age, the need for a message of hope and love and waking up to the crisis we’ve created on our Planet? If peace is not in our hearts, how can it be in the world?

We love those we love. We live the life we create, deciding if it’s “good” or “bad”, if we are content or not. With our thoughts we create our reality.

On to the Guggenheim…