Julio Romero
de Torres
Between Myth and Tradition
27 April 2013 - 8 September 2013
The Sisters of Saint Marina, 1915
Fundación Caja Rural de Córdoba
The Sisters of Saint Marina, 1915
Fundación Caja Rural de CórdobaJulio Romero de Torres. Between Myth and Tradition surveys the work of one of the most popular painters in Spanish historiography and reflects on his career through different sections dealing with the most frequently recurring themes in his output.
Julio Romero de Torres (Cordoba, 1874–1930) is one of the most renowned Spanish artists of what was known as the fin-de-siècle period and has come to be regarded as the absolute master of Andalusian symbolism. His oeuvre has long been associated with popular and folk trends in Spanish painting, but it has an identity of its own and has gone from being considered merely commonplace to being hailed as an aesthetic trend of symbolism.
Romero de Torres lived between Cordoba and Madrid. It was in the capital that his work became known on account of his friendship with important artists and writers of the period, chiefly Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. The author became his mentor and the dissemination of his aesthetic ideas and writings on the painter secured Romero de Torres lasting recognition.
The exhibition is organised into several thematic sections which also trace the painter’s stylistic development. Linked from childhood to the Cordoba museum of paintings – where his father was curator, as well as a painter – Julio Romero de Torres spent his formative period under the influence of his father’s teaching, the Cordoba museum and the classrooms of the School of Fine Arts and Music Conservatory. During what is considered to be the first stage in his career, he cultivated a luminarist style of painting linked to an aesthetic rooted in impressionism. However, it was following a trip to Italy in 1908 that his career experienced an about-turn and his distinctive painting style took shape. From this point onwards his compositions are characterised by their heavily symbolic connotations and by the constant presence of the concept of duality to represent the symbiotic relationship between two moral extremes.