From El Greco to Goya

Rounding up a collection of classic Spanish painting has never been an easy task--outside Spain. In Europe, Spanish work was almost unknown until after Napoleon's looting and the later purchases of Louis Philippe gave France and Austria a chance to assemble collections. Madrid's Prado gallery, of course, still has the most. In the U.S., where collectors equipped with bulging pocketbooks and ranging tastes assiduously bought up Spanish masterpieces in recent generations, there are a number of good private and public collections to draw from. It is from these that the show "El Greco to Goya," which opened last week at Indianapolis' John Herron Museum of Art, was borrowed--the biggest and best gathering of classic Spanish work in this country.

All the big names are there. Four familiar-looking Velasquez portraits add their placid luster to the candid Goyas and the anamorphic El Grecos. Glimpsed as a whole, the exhibition has an almost rotogravure quality in the predominant browns and blacks of the backgrounds, the dramatic lighting that seems to spotlight colorful details like the little nosegay on the staff of Ribera's Saint Joseph (opposite). Landscapes are notably missing: Spanish painters were mostly interested in painting people rather than scenery. But religious subjects, redolent of the mystery and aspiration that typified every Spaniard's day-by-day point of view, abound. Murillo's Christ After the Flagellation (overleaf) has a tragic, mystic quality. On the other hand, Zurbaran's St. Francis Praying, painted around 1650, is a surprisingly sophisticated example of religious preoccupation; St. Francis seems almost like a zealot interrupted at prayer and, like many old Spanish works, the picture looks surprisingly modern.

The least typically Spanish work is that of Juan van der Hamen y Leon, whose father was a Flemish painter in Madrid. Completely Flemish in technique and approach, Van der Hamen had a tremendous influence in forming the school of Spanish still-life painting that later developed with Melendez, De Loarte and even Goya. After the show closes in Indianapolis in late March, it will go to the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence for a month, and then be dispersed again to its scattered owners.

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