Stolen Spanish Art

Stolen Spanish Art

After a lengthy legal battle, a California court has decided that Spanish museum can keep a painting titled “Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie,” by Camille Pissarro that a German Jewish woman has stated that she was forced to sell the painting before fleeing the Nazis.

The federal court held that ownership was governed by Spanish law, which allows buyers to retain works they purchased if they did not possess “actual knowledge” the work had been stolen.

The original owner, Lilly Cassirer, had been forced to sell the painting to a Nazi art appraiser in 1939 for the equivalent of $360 which eventually made it’s way to the Madrid museum as part of the collection acquired by Spain from Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 1958, she received financial compensation from the German government for the loss of her painting. But as part of the settlement, she did not waive her right to seek its return.

In its ruling this week, the California court found that Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza paid “fair market value” when he acquired the Pissarro painting for $300,000 in 1976 but should have done more to take it’s connection to Nazi looting.

Overall, the court found, “there is no evidence that the baron made any inquiries regarding the painting’s provenance or conducted any investigation of the painting’s provenance before purchasing it.” The Pissarro painting has been on display in Madrid since 1992 and  now ranks among the most visited places in the Spanish capital.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about the dispute over Stolen Spanish Art! Who do you believe is the rightful owner of “Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie?” Join the conversation below!

At A Loss For Art

At A Loss For Art

On the Christmas Eve of 1734, and most of the residents of the Real Alcázar de Madrid, the palace that housed the Spanish royal court, were in the chapel pews to observe midnight Mass all while on the other side of the palace, a fire had broken out in the rooms of the French painter Jean Ranc, who had been working as the Spanish royal family’s official portraitist.

It has been said that Ranc’s poor eyesight led an inability to detect the flames, and the fire bells were mistaken for the expected chimes that ushered in the holiday celebrations as well as the fact that the majority of the castle’s occupants were confined to the chapel and unable to quickly attend to the inferno immediately.

Unfortunately, the Alcázar burned down along with more than 500 works from the Spanish royal family’s art collection.

Built in the mid-ninth century, the Alcázar was present for nearly 1,000 years of Spanish history. It was originally built by Emir Mohamed, the ruler of what would become Madrid, following the Moors’ conquest of the Iberian peninsula. After the Christians regained control, they instituted the Spanish monarchy and each successive ruler put their own touch on the palace (much like the United States’ White House). In preparation for a new bout of construction, a large part of the collection that had been amassed in the previous century was relocated to another location prior to the outbreak of the fire. They were spared from the tragedy as were a good number of the paintings that hung on the Alcázar’s walls.

After the initial mayhem following the fire alarm, an effort was made to save some of the art while the blaze raged on as nearly 1,200 of the pieces were cut from their frames and tossed to the courtyard below (including famed masterpieces such as  Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” and Titian’s “Equestrian Portrait of Charles V”).

Among the 500 works that were lost in the fire are some that disappeared without any trace that they ever existed while others left behind records of the great cultural loss.  One could say the silver lining of the destruction of the castle gave Spaniards an excuse to build the extravagant Royal Palace of Madrid which still stands today.

While historians continue to agree that the flame first came to life in his room, the Jean Ranc denied it until the end of his life while even going so far as to put himself forward for contention for the job of overseeing the restoration of the recovered Alcázar works in order to save his good name.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed At A Loss For Art! Ready to view the surviving pieces from the original historic castle? Our culturally immersive group classes and native instructors can prepare you for your foreign artistic experience faster than you may think. Click below to learn more!

From MS Paint to Mary Poppins

We all have ideas of what we expect “grandmas” to spend their time doing. Among these would be: knitting, gardening, and maybe even painting. However, there is one Spanish grandmother that is making digital waves in the art world. 87-year-old Concha Garcia Zaera enjoys a hobby that’s rather unusually among her friends. She creates masterpieces by utilizing Microsoft Paint which she discovered after her children gave her a computer.

Photo: Instagram

Before Zaera was an MS Paint artist, she created pictures using a more traditional approach. She recently told Radio Valencia that she had previously taken classes in oil painting but that their strong smell prevented her from practicing at home.

Photo: Instagram

Zaera told El Mundo. “I began painting little things: first, a house, the next day I’d add a mountain… Step by step, I was adding details, and in the end, the result was a very pretty thing.”

After posting her works on Facebook to a very limited audience, one of her granddaughters suggested that she should use Instagram instead. It has paid off quite a bit as she has garnered not only a whopping 189.9k Followers, but a contract with Disney to paint a piece for the new movie, “Mary Poppins Returns."

Photo: Instagram

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We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing how Concha Garcia Zaera has gone From MS Paint to Mary Poppins. What’s your favorite of her masterful digital creations? Join the conversation below!

Showcasing The Movida Madrileña

Showcasing The Movida Madrileña

For anyone that would consider themselves a fan of French art, a groundbreaking new exhibition about counter-culture during the Spanish transition to democracy previewed this month at a contemporary art museum in Madrid.

Photo: Antonio Mercero, La cabina, 1972. Image courtesy of RTVE

The exhibition, titled "The Poetics of Democracy: Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition,” draws from an event that took place in 1976 at the Venice Biennale - also known as the Red Biennale - when organizers used the event as a platform to showcase art oppressed by Spain's former military dictator Francisco Franco as a way of reshaping the historical narrative of Spain's art scene since the regime took hold in 1936.

In 1968, global youth and art movements radically transformed the world and a counter-culture emerged in Spain as a parallel narrative to the official one.  During this cultural revolution, a network of creatives across Madrid garnered enough momentum to push an organized movement through not only collectives but media including magazines, radio shows, and even graffiti art. This paved the way for the "Movida Madrileña," a cultural movement that started after Franco's death in 1975 that represented the emergence of a new Spanish identity characterized by freedom of expression, transgression of the taboos imposed by the Franco regime, and drug usage.

   The exhibition showcases images across various disciplines that bring Spain's counterculture of the 1970s out of the shadows and runs at the Reina Sofia from Dec. 5-Nov. 25.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about how the Venice Biennale is Showcasing The Movida Madrileña! Want to pay the exhibit a visit in person? Be sure to check out our culturally immersive group classes before you book your tickets! Click below to learn more.