Qssi in the News
Between Heaven and Earth
by Laura Jacobs February 9, 2012
'There's nothing traditional left in Murcia—no earrings or jewelry . . . everything is lost, nothing remains, not even a simple cap I'd hoped to find." So wrote the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, in 1918, to his wife, Clotilde. He was traveling through Spain doing studies for the kind of commission that is an artist's dream. Archer Milton Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, had asked Sorolla for a cycle of mural-size paintings representing the customs and dress of Spain's 11 regions. Begun in 1911 and completed in 1919, the majestic, 14-panel "Vision of Spain" would be the climax of Sorolla's career. His plaintive cri de coeur—"everything is lost"—suggests just how far-reaching and detailed his vision was. It's an old story, this search for the vivid imprints of one's early years. "You have to go deep into the countryside," Sorolla wrote Clotilde.
And deep into the countryside is where "Joaquin Sorolla & the Glory of Spanish Dress," at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, takes us. Curated by Vogue's André Leon Talley, the show was conceived by the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who initiated the Institute's acclaimed exhibition of last year, "Balenciaga: Spanish Master." That exhibition demonstrated the ways in which Spain's sartorial inheritance—the matador's embroidered bolero, the flounces of Flamenco, the lace veils of Catholicism, the stark outerwear of shepherds—had been absorbed and abstracted into Cristóbal Balenciaga's masterly and vastly influential Paris couture. From the 1940s to the 1960s, many a socialite's cocktail dress was actually the silhouette of a Spanish goatherd or a Jeronymite nun, ineffably transmuted...
