January 2009

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Although little known in the English-speaking world, Antonio López García is easily Spain’s most loved living painter. A stubborn perfectionist, he exhibits his work only rarely – it can take him 20 years to complete a picture – but over the decades, his humane brand of realism has earned him a devoted following, especially among the younger generation of Spanish artists, who greet this reticent, almost painfully shy 72-year-old with the sort of adulation usually reserved for rock stars. López García’s panoramic Madrid cityscapes, contemporary masterpieces as remarkable for their technical prowess as for their haunting sense of place, have become emblems of Spain’s modern identity and can be found, in poster versions, adorning student dorm rooms across the country.

All the more surprising, then, that when Spain’s new national museum of 20th-century art, the Reina Sofía, unveiled the installation of its permanent collection in 1992, López García and the entire realist school from which he had sprung were pointedly omitted from the display. The Reina Sofía’s curators had opted, reasonably enough, to define 20th-century Spanish art in terms of the internationally acclaimed masters of modernism’s heroic period, such as Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Juan Gris. Celebrating Spain’s post-Franco-era reintegration into the world community, they also leavened the installation with such contemporary artists as Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida and Antonio Saura, who had gained substantial foreign followings by exhibiting abroad and working in a self-consciously avant-garde manner. The stay-at-home López García, however, whose fame was strictly a local affair and whose desire to depict the circumstances of his everyday existence may have seemed – to high-modernist eyes – a somewhat provincial project, was unceremoniously snubbed.

This led to uproar in the press, and the curators – who found themselves accused by editorialists of bias, blindness and gross condescension – were soon obliged to relent. Sensibly, they agreed to set aside a room at the Reina Sofía for Spanish realism. What’s more, a year later, the museum mounted a 90-work retrospective of López García’s career – a blockbuster event that had, in fact, been planned well before the contretemps over the permanent collection – thus dramatically placing the imprimatur of official recognition on the artist’s growing reputation as a national treasure.

The exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is only about half the size of the 1993 Reina Sofía show, but, importantly, it is López García’s first museum retrospective in the us and only his second outside Spain. Ably organised by the MFA’s curator of contemporary art, Cheryl Brutvan, it gives the non-Spanish public a welcome intro-duction to this serious and significant artist, whose intense relationship to his local environment has produced a vision of the world that transcends mere regionalism and speaks eloquently to a universal audience.

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