Inside the Anders Zorn Exhibition in Madrid (Full Walkthrough)

So this exhibition takes place in the Fondation Mapre. It's this insurance company, so in pretty much any other setting you'd probably consider it quite an evil place, but in this case it really has done us a great service. We arrived at 11am, bang on opening time, so we had the whole exhibition day. It was pretty busy so we had to wait in line. Now if you're new to painting you might be asking who is Anders Zorn? Well Anders Zorn is a Swedish artist born in 1860. He reached international success for his paintings. He's often not well known by the general public or at least outside of Sweden, but within small circles like those artists who have gone through academic training he is regarded as one of the finest painters of all time. He's often placed side by side John Singer Sargent, Sorolla, Cecilia Boe and others. He's often admired for his grounded realism yet impressionistic qualities, often exhibiting amazing loose brushstrokes without losing the truth of what's in front of him, something that is much easier said than done. Anyway, as soon as you walk into the exhibition you're met with Zorn himself, not once but two times. Your eye is kind of immediately pulled towards the larger painting, a self-portrait in red, one of his last self-portraits he ever painted and one of his most famous. It is kind of imposing and full of these broad and confident brushstrokes. He stands there at the entrance to the exhibition almost like this kind of gatekeeper inviting you in but at the same time he really commands respect. Then to the left is this much younger self-portrait. It's Zorn sculpting a portrait of Emma Zorn and I really love this painting because it instantly shows you Zorn's full range of abilities. He's not just a painter, he does a lot of sculpture and he also does an incredible amount of etchings throughout his life. So he's this artist that covers so many mediums and then you kind of enter the exhibition fully and you're overwhelmed by paintings everywhere, wall after wall after wall, watercolour, watercolour, watercolour and what I didn't know is there was just so much more to come. Okay so whilst I was editing this video I came across a dilemma. You see I took photographs of every single painting in that exhibition and at a really high quality and it's just kind of impractical for me to share them in their entirety in this video. It's also kind of impractical for me to do like a whole Anders Zorn biography as much as I would love to do that. So instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I kind of experienced the exhibition, what I thought of whilst I was there looking at them in person, the things you you kind of notice that you wouldn't so if you're looking them purely digitally as you are now. But with my explanation it might help. If you do want to experience the exhibition as most similar as it was there on the day there is a way to do that and I'll put that at the end of the video. I'll put a time code here if you just want to skip over all of my opinions. Anyway let's get back. So this exhibition covers two floors. The first being his early years and thus watercolors and upstairs is where most of his oil paintings sat. Now I'd seen for years and years and years and years Zorn's watercolors via my computer. In fact I have a folder just for his use of this medium. They're just works that inform us how he thinks and they held influence over his entire career. They all vary in size from works that are like a meter in size to tiny little works no larger than your hand. They varied from incredible amounts of detail to works that were very loose and sketch-like. There was truly this like full spectrum of his ability and quite frankly it was kind of overwhelming. It's kind of like meeting a celebrity but I also felt this great sense of relief. I was finally able to see his work in person and just as you can imagine they really are just awesome. They have this incredible amount of sensitivity yet done with such confidence and power. Something that Zorn is very well known for. Okay so there was one thing that I just kept hearing over and over again in the people around me in the exhibition and it was more or less like this. And it happened over and over again and I think we can really understand why. You see people just don't associate watercolor with the way Zorn's painting it today. There's something about his watercolors that immediately feel different. They just don't fit into the image people have for what this medium is capable of. They have the presence, the value range, the detail and often the confidence that people just associate more with oil painting or today maybe acrylic painting. Take this painting for example. The entire scene is almost in shadow yet figures never disappear into the darkness. Instead of exposing as it were for the brightest parts of the scene Zorn effectively exposes for the shadows. The wall catches the light and loses detail but the sensation of bright sunlight is still completely convincing. It's a simple decision but one that allows him to use almost the entire value range. Pair that with this like amazing amount of detail he chooses to put in places but more than just the detail it's this like very deliberate stroke. He's saying it was exactly like this. You can really see how people just are kind of astonished by the way he's using this medium. John F Carson writing about not quite but in this similar kind of period in his book A Carson's Guide to Landscape Painting advises his students do not for at least the first year of your study attempt to work in watercolor. Oil painting allows much abuse in its handling. With watercolor the case is rather the reverse. The transparency of the watercolor allows of no radical changes of color or of composition in the picture. Now that's a common sentiment of watercolor in that time. What's fascinating is Anders Zorn spends nearly all of his early career doing exactly that using watercolor. This almost you could say forbidden medium for beginners. Not because he believed watercolor was this kind of I don't know superior medium or something. It really comes down to what he can afford. You see Zorn grew up in rural Sweden with his mother and grandparents. He never really knew his father and by the age of 12 he died. His father that is. A small inheritance then eventually allowed him to study in the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts when he was 15. His original intent was actually to become a sculptor but he quickly fell in love in picture making. Money however remained tight so instead of buying expensive oil paints he worked primarily in watercolor. In many ways necessity kind of shaped his education. Yet he was surrounded by like oil painters working from a medium that a lot of people considered secondary. So whether consciously or not I can't help wonder if maybe he felt he had something to prove. This in many ways would also serve as like a motivation to him to push the medium further than you know maybe others wouldn't. And in his watercolors he really demonstrates the full range that the medium has to offer. In many ways there are like differences with what Zorn's doing in his watercolors than what maybe a modern day watercolorist might do. Now obviously you know modern day watercolorist is a huge and varied art movement. You can probably find someone using the medium in every conceivable way. However a popular ideology in this medium today is one that puts like a great emphasis on the paint itself. There's often this like enormous amount of importance put on preserving the freshness of the wash to celebrate the natural courses the paint wants to make in the water laid on the page. This often results in absolutely perfect finishes but in my opinion sometimes a bit of a loss. When a method of painting focuses too much on the paint itself you begin to stray away from the emotional and pictorial goals one might have. And Zorn like artists today understand the medium incredibly well. His technique is impeccable yet he rarely seems to favor a paint application over a visual truth. Zorn has beautiful washes and truly the freshest of strokes yet even in the most abstract places you can sense that they are still grounded in the visual truth that he's after. He also does like a lot of changes and alterations in his work. Like in this painting you can see the steps through the woman's dress and perhaps originally there was never a person in the foreground or there was going to be but they couldn't pose until later. And in the painting the Alhambra you can see this kind of like puckered texture throughout the whole shadow side of the scene. This could be an effect that's often gotten when someone lifts pigment off of the paper and applies another wash over the top. Perhaps he struggled or reiterated but at the top he really seems to have embraced it or enhanced it and turned it into the texture the Moroccan architecture has. And nearly all of his watercolors in the show had either a little or a lot of opaque white and in some circles today the use of opaque white is is a great taboo. It's of great importance to maintain the white of the paper to maintain that brilliance and freshness yet Zorn's use of white never detracts from the picture. In the painting Christina Morphe in the hair and the ribbon there is a bunch of opaque white used and in the ruffle of her shoulder there are thick applications of opaque color that can be seen. Neither examples detract from the freshness of the paint. In fact in many ways they kind of heighten it. Another great example of this is in the painting A Summer Holiday and this is an absolute masterpiece of watercolor painting. Yet if we zoom in to the immaculately painted water we can see that all of the highlights are opaque white. In fact I even believe all of the middle tones of the water are also an opaque white. I think there's this like great richness that can be had with the mix of opaque white with transparent colors. With Zorn it's not clear where he's using opaque white and where he's using transparency. There is a transition. He's using both of them simultaneously. I don't see it as a cheat to use the opaque white. I see it really as like this added depth to what the medium has to offer. He isn't using the opaque paint out of a lack of skill. He's using it because it's just simply the best way to get the result he wants. He seems to be an artist that knows exactly what he wants in every painting. One of my all-time favorite paintings by Zorn is Fish Market St Ives and as it happens we actually have an account of how it was painted. Edward Simmons who painted alongside Zorn during this period recalled finding the enormous watercolor leaning against the side of the house while Zorn threw buckets of water over it and in Zorn's words bringing it together. Later during a thunderstorm rain landed across the surface leaving large spots in the foreground. Everyone thought the painting had been ruined. Zorn simply looked at it and said now I can make a fine picture. Those raindrops eventually became footprints in the sand details that later viewers would praise for their naturalness. I think that story is so interesting. The painting itself is proof of Zorn's academic prowess yet he's open to changes and iterations. He's this like incredibly trained artist that is also just so flexible. It's so cool to see. So stepping back from the paint itself we can start to look at how Zorn actually constructs a picture. More than almost any other painter I know he really seems to have this ability, this incredible ability, to guide the viewer exactly where he wants you to look. A great example of this is the Nymph of Love. There are actually two versions of this painting by Zorn although only this one was included in the exhibition. Both are heavily inspired by nymphs and fauns by one of Zorn's teachers Julius Kronberg. Now Kronberg's version is much larger and it's an oil painting and while it is a beautiful work in its own right I've always preferred Zorn's interpretation. From the moment you stand in front of it it just has this atmosphere that the original just doesn't quite have. What impresses me the most is how naturally he controls your attention. He uses drawing values color and edges almost like these invisible tools. Around the nymph there is a concentration of contrast. There are warm oranges set against cool greens of the background. Elsewhere the edges soften and dissolve allowing your eye to move effortlessly through the painting before returning exactly where Zorn wants you to. He really is like this conductor of your attention. It's something I notice again and again throughout his work and personally I think very few painters then or now control the viewer's eye quite as well. Another painting that demonstrates this beautifully is the Gardens of Alhambra. At first your eye is completely overwhelmed by this dense mass of foliage but you quickly notice hidden away in the lower left a couple embracing. From there your eye begins to wander naturally through the painting following the pathways of light and shadow before almost circling back to the couple again and then you notice something. Just the slightest suggestion of a striped cat quietly watching the scene unfold. It's only a few brushstrokes but the slightest blur suggests movement so convincingly that it immediately feels alive. I can really imagine Zorn painting it on the day. The couple have been posing maybe for an hour or two and by pure chance a cat just wanders through the garden and in that moment he sees it and is like that's what the painting needs and he paints it in before the cat disappears again. Of course I have no idea if that actually happened like that but it's believable now. You can really feel like that's what happened there. I love that kind of thing in a painting. Edward Simmons memoirs are fascinating because they give us one of the clearest accounts of Zorn's introduction into oil painting. I say introduction rather loosely. We know that Zorn experimented at least a little bit in oil paints during his academic years. There's a few academic studies done in that medium but it was here in St Ives at the age of 27 that he truly embraced the medium. Simmons shared everything from materials techniques to the limited palette that would later become famous as the Zorn palette. He got it from Simmons. It was during this period that Zorn painted several important oils including by the Stove and Fisherman at St Ives. Unfortunately neither of those oil paintings were included in this exhibition. What was on display however was Emma Zorn reading. Often it's kind of regarded as Zorn's first truly successful oil painting and standing in front of it it is remarkable just how much of a mature Zorn is already there. The beautiful sense of light, the confident brushwork and this impressionistic handling that would later become so recognisable. Looking closely you can already see evidence of the way he worked. Beneath fresh brushstrokes are earlier dry passages. These pentamenti could only have been created over multiple sittings. Probably two, maybe three, not many. You can almost watch him thinking through the painting, placing something in, stepping back and kind of changing his mind and refining it as he goes. That willingness to explore and revise is something that we'll come back to later because it becomes one of the kind of almost defining characteristics of his mature oils or at least in my opinion. In many ways this painting feels like a test and it really is. It's kind of a test in himself to see if he can paint in this medium that he's probably kind of hyped up to in his in his mind. So he's applying everything he's learned through watercolor into a completely different medium and looking at the result I think it's pretty fair to say he did a good job. And fortunately we have Emma Zorn's opinion on Zorn's first oil paintings. She says in a letter, I prefer him painting watercolors then I don't have those horrid brushes to wash out. And so far his watercolors have been better than his oil paintings. Okay back to the exhibition. After several rooms filled almost entirely with watercolors I had honestly assumed that that was kind of the end of the show. I don't know why, I just assumed I've got more than I already asked for so I can't ask for any more. But amazingly there was an elevator up to the next floor and wow there was quite a surprise waiting. The oil painting section was just as impressive as the watercolors and perhaps even more impressive because of the larger scale. I remember as soon as I walked in I caught a self-portrait with a model in the corner of my eye. It was one of the paintings I had been most looking forward to seeing in this exhibition but I deliberately stopped myself from going to it straight away. I wanted to savor it and experience the exhibition as it had been laid out. Fortunately that really wasn't a difficult thing to do because every wall seemed to have another painting demanding your attention. One work that immediately caught my eye was Madame Red Cough. Somehow despite seeing reproductions of this painting many times before I had never noticed the little dog tucked away in the bottom right corner. Seeing it in person it suddenly seemed impossible to miss. The oils themselves varied enormously just like the watercolors from small studies to large exhibition pieces. Some remained wonderfully sketch-like while others were brought to a much higher level of finish yet all of them shared those rich confident brushstrokes that so many painters admire as the one for. What really struck me though was was something that the pictures online simply don't communicate. Standing in front of the originals you suddenly become aware of just like how varied his paint handling really is. Pentimenti where earlier ideas remain visible beneath later ones. Areas scraped back and repainted. Impastos sitting beneath fresh layers of paint. Thin washes laid in with turpentine. Softening edges. The direction of individual brushstrokes. The texture of different canvases. Even the cracking of the paint itself begins to tell the story of how these pictures were made. Many painters leave evidence of their process but with Zorn it somehow feels different. He never seems to become overly attached to any particular passage. The canvas remains like this open statement almost until like the very end. Nothing appears too precious to repaint over it if it serves the picture better. Like if you compare him with Sargent it really is fascinating. Sargent certainly has pentimenti like thick paint and corrections but his finished paintings almost always arrive to this like beautiful resolved surface. There's like a particular quality of paint that he seems determined to achieve. Zorn on the other hand feels much freer. His brushwork remains every bit as confident but he uses whatever kind of mark the painting demands in a particular moment. For years I've looked at reproductions of Sargent, Sicilio Bo, Sorolla and Zorn and I've thought of them as belonging to much the same family of painters and let's be real in many ways they really are. But seeing their work in person like individually has made me really realize how different they really are. Each approaches the surface of the painting in a completely individual way. One difference I found particularly interesting was the use of impasto. Sargent often seems to build towards the thickest passage. If you could look at one of his paintings in profile or cross section the painting would gently rise towards the face where the most beautiful modeling highlights catch the light. He almost like sculpts the form with the paint itself. Zorn doesn't seem to work quite like that, not nearly as much. Instead thick passages appear almost wherever they need to. Looking across the surface of one of his paintings you don't see like smooth hills of paint but like little peaks and interruptions. Moments where a decisive stroke has simply been placed exactly where it needs to be. I can't help wondering whether this comes from his years working in watercolor. To him these thicker passages weren't something to build towards but simply like another tool. Much like using opaque white to correct or strengthen a passage in watercolor. And to be clear it's not that I think Zorn is a more varied artist. Sargent has works with crazy applications and thick amounts of paint but what I'm getting at is how they reached it. Sargent seems set on what he wants. He does everything for a clear reason whereas I feel with Zorn a lot of variation appears through his process naturally. In places it really feels like the texture of the paint is simply a result of correcting and changing passages of paint. Again and again you see these impastoes buried beneath you know later paint. Earlier ideas remain visible almost kind of inviting you to imagine what the picture looked like only hours before. Perhaps he like appreciated the richness they they brought to the surface. Whatever the reason I really really like it. It's awesome. And just to quickly demonstrate some of that application I'm just going to show some shots that I took in the museum looking up catching the light. You can really start to see the quality of paint that Zorn is is doing. One of the things I love most when standing in front of an original painting is being able to witness the artist's thinking. Years ago when I first visited the Tate Britain I stood in front of Arthur Hacker's The Annunciation. What struck me wasn't simply how well painted it was it is but how clearly you could see that he had kind of struggled with it. The face had been worked and reworked until he finally arrived at what what he wanted. In a strange way you could almost feel the effort still living in the paint. Standing in front of Zorn's oils I had the same feeling and today I think many of us strive for the perfect brushstroke, the perfect application, the perfect first attempt. Artists like Zorn or Antonio Mancini and many of his contemporaries seemed far less concerned with preserving perfection. They searched, they changed their mind, they corrected, they painted over passages and they left fragments of earlier decisions behind. Those traces remain like ghosts beneath the final image. Personally I think we've lost something of that spirit and it's something I'd really like to bring more into my own work because in the end it's those very human decisions, the searching, the uncertainty, the willingness to change that often gives a painting a real great sense of life. One thing that becomes increasingly apparent throughout Zorn's career is his willingness to leave things unsaid and this is very similar to what we talked about in his watercolors about edges. But in some of his earlier works you can still see him kind of describing objects like more completely but as the years go on, particularly in his oils, he becomes happier and happier to suggest rather than to explain. His paintings become increasingly more impressionistic in the Velázquez sense, yet they never lose their grounding in reality. I think this is most evident whenever he paints foliage. Standing back you feel completely convinced by the trees and plants before you. Stepping closer though, however, and they become to dissolve into little more than abstract shapes, broken edges and carefully placed notes of colour. He captures the character of a plant without ever describing every leaf. It's an incredible balancing act between observation and simplification. Nature is chaotic. Zorn never tries to organise that chaos by painting everything. Instead he remains faithful to it while somehow bringing a harmony to the painting as a whole. Of course this idea isn't confined to his landscapes. The same abstraction appears throughout his figures. From across the room they feel completely solid and alive but as soon as you move closer they dissolve into confident shapes of colour, value and brushwork. It becomes like a celebration of paint itself at that scale while somehow never losing sight of the person being portrayed. What amazes me is that despite all of this economy he could still refine a passage whenever he felt it was needed. One area may be suggested with only a handful of strokes while another is rendered to an incredible delicacy. The contrast of these broad brush strokes next to this extremely nicely refined and modelled face is amazing. It's just incredibly ridiculous how effortlessly he seems to move between the two. By this point in the exhibition I realised this wasn't really about oil painting anymore. There was a small room dedicated to his etching. Unfortunately I didn't photograph them, something I really regret now. Yet looking at them the same idea immediately becomes apparent. The atmosphere, the simplification, the confidence, the use of values, the same way of directing the eye. Nothing had really changed. The medium had. The thinking hadn't. Even his sculptures carried the same feeling. They were beautifully observed yet retained that freshness and suggestion that runs throughout all of his work. One painting in particular stayed with me, the 1895 self-portrait with a fauna nymph dedicated to the Spanish painter Ramón Casas. Exactly how and when these two met I'm not entirely sure, though it was most likely during one of Zorn's many visits to Spain. Looking at the painting it feels as though it was completed in a single sitting. It isn't especially refined but it captures such like an extraordinary sense of light that it hardly matters. It's easy to understand why Sorolla admired Zorn so much and it's very famous how much Sorolla admires Zorn. In fact in many ways he regards Zorn as the best painter of his time. Both painters share this wonderful directness with the brush but I think Zorn pushes the optical side of the painting even further. He seems happier to leave passages unresolved like I talked about before, trusting that our eye, the viewer, will complete the picture for him. Zorn wasn't interested in describing everything. He only painted enough for us to believe the rest. After spending all this time talking about brushwork and pasto and abstractions, just like the material aspect to his paintings, I realized I haven't really talked about probably the most important part. As painters it is very easy to become caught up in the paint itself. That's often what we take home with us after looking at such amazing painters. But that's obviously not the most important part to painting. With Zorn he seems deeply empathetic towards his subjects, almost as though he's not just trying to paint their appearance but to really understand them. His figures feel alive. There always seems to be something happening beneath the surface. What amazes me is that he achieves this while painting with these amazing confident brush strokes that are so bold and full of life, yet they never overwhelm or distract from the humanity of the person in front of him. And that's true regardless of the medium, whether it's a watercolor, oil painting, etching or even his sculptures. There's always that kind of sensitivity there. There was something deeper Zorn was trying to express. Even his landscapes possess that same kind of quiet sense of feeling that they're not simply records of places but places filled with atmosphere, memory and emotion. His paintings capture something that goes beyond optical truth. They capture what it feels like to be there. Towards the end of the exhibition there lay one last treat, one I really never expected to see. A video of Anders Zorn himself in his hometown of Mora and I'm just going to play that in its entirety so you can take it in. This awesome exhibition represents a massive amount of Zorn's life and here in this video he is standing way taller than I had expected. It's just so cool to get a feel for him in the movement the video can give us. And I cannot overstate how amazing I think that last video is. I'd never seen Zorn in movement. It's such a rare thing to see. I'd seen photographs of him and obviously self-portraits but to see him moving it reminds you how human he is. He's just like me and you. He walked this planet, he had his own troubles, his ups and downs. He isn't just paint god in that sense. It grounded him in my mind. I empathized with him more. I found that really quite amazing. Anyway so you're probably wondering how can you experience this exhibition online now? Well I photographed every single painting in the exhibition at a really high resolution as well as all of the information cards that the exhibition displayed. I've put those files into a google drive folder at a slightly smaller resolution so you can view them easily and download them. For the average person, for 99.9% of you, it's going to be more than enough. You'll be able to zoom in, look at it, experience the exhibition as best as I could make it. As if you were there on the day in that sense. Anyway I hope you enjoyed all this. It's been too long now. I need to go and do some gardening. A tree needs pruning.