Museo Carmen Thyssen

This exhibition, which brings together for the first time the graphic work of three artists who played a key role in the drive to modernise Spanish art in the 1920s and the 1930s – José Gutiérrez Solana, Pancho Cossío and Francisco Bores –, introduces spectators to a grim universe. The 34 prints featured in Black is the Night, from the Museum Collection of the University of Cantabria, bring viewers face to face with a bleak and gruesome iconography of lowlife.

This visual version of ‘Black Spain’ is striking both for its stylistic modernity (an expressionism unparalleled in Spanish art at the time) and for its marginal, nocturnal iconography of ragamuffins, scoundrels and prostitutes. The group of prints also provides an interesting update of Spanish art's ancestral attraction to the abyss, from the Baroque to Goya's black paintings, through the work of three very different personalities: Solana's heterodox genre scenes transferred to etchings, Cossío's illustrations for the book Hampa. Estampas de la mala vida (Riffraff. Scenes of Lowlife, 1923), and the varied set of woodcuts by the young Ultraist Bores.

Black is the Night represents the dark side of the new Spanish realisms of the interwar period, the first determined attempt at an art that broke away from the nineteenth-century past and academic conventions. These creative works by individualistic artists emerged on the Spanish art scene to subvert tradition, like the first light of dawn heralding the start of a new day when the darkest night ends.

Images:
Pancho Cossío. Cora and Enriqueta, 1923 [1984]
Xilografía sobre papel, 180 x 125 mm
Colección Museográfica de la Universidad de Cantabria. Sección Arte Gráfico

José Gutiérrez Solana. Women of the Street, c. 1923-1933 [1963]
Aguafuerte sobre papel, 235 x 290 mm
Colección Museográfica de la Universidad de Cantabria. Sección Arte Gráfico
© Gutiérrez Solana, VEGAP, Málaga, 2022

Francisco Bores. Frontispiece, c. 1922-1924 [1977]
Xilografía sobre papel, 230 x 294 mm
Colección Museográfica de la Universidad de Cantabria. Sección Arte Gráfico
© Carmen Bores, 2022

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