José Gutiérrez Solana

Private collection, USA (purchased at the 1936 exhibition)
Private collection, Spain
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1991

Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, International Exhibition of Paintings, 1936, no. 316
Madrid, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, José Gutiérrez Solana, 2004, illustrated in the catalogue

Manuel Sánchez Camargo, Biografía de Solana, Madrid, 1945, p. 101
Manuel Sánchez Camargo, Solana, Vida y Pintura, Madrid, 1962, illustrated pp. 48-49 (as Máscaras en las afueras)
Luis Alonso Fernández, J. Solana. Estudio y Catalogación de su obra, Madrid, 1985, p. 246, no. P. 262, catalogued & illustrated

The canvas has been relined, and is on its original stretcher, signed and titled by the artist. Ultraviolet light reveals scattered spots of retouching in most parts of the composition. The overall appearance of the work under normal light is good and it is ready to hang.
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Painted circa 1935, The Masquerade of the Brooms is a brilliant expression of Solana's peculiar and tragic aesthetic. The masked subjects, dark palette, and ‘dirty’ tones imbue the painting with a psychological unease that links it directly to Goya’s works, in particular El Entierro de la Sardina (fig. 1), which Solana would have studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The poet Antonio Machado called Solana a ‘necromantic Goya’, who ‘paints with insane voluptuousness, treating life as though it were death, death as though it were life' (John F. Moffit, The Arts in Spain, New York, 1999, p. 198).

Solana’s paintings at once satirise and celebrate the rites and rituals of the rural communities of Santander and Castille. By focusing on the fanciful, the hysterical, the grotesque, and the macabre, Solana emphasises the bleak provinciality that isolated Spain from modern Europe following the loss of its colonial possessions and status as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Solana - like the patriotic intellectuals of the Generación de 98 who called for the regeneration of Spain and with whom he fraternised - seems to be saying that the country’s future is founded upon its proud traditions and the patriotism of its people.

Born on Carnival Sunday in Madrid in 1886, Solana was predestined to have a fascination with processions and grotesque masks. Like the Belgian Symbolist and Realist artist James Ensor (fig. 2), whose works he would have known through their mutual friend Darío de Regoyos, masks allowed Solana to remove himself and his art from the political statement that underlies so many of his paintings.