Spanish treasures

Alba family’s exhibit shares impressive art collection, manuscripts and documents

Peter Paul Rubens’ oil on canvas, Charles V and the Empress Isabella, c. 1628, is part of the exhibition “Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting” at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Peter Paul Rubens’ oil on canvas, Charles V and the Empress Isabella, c. 1628, is part of the exhibition “Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting” at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

DALLAS -- With its superb collection of Spanish painting and its grand building at the entrance to Southern Methodist University, the Meadows Museum seems as if it has been in Dallas for more than a century rather than the 50 years it is celebrating this year.

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Coleccion Duques de Alba

Fra Angelico’s panel painting The Virgin of the Pomegranate, c. 1426, part of an exhibition of art from the House of Alba, is on display through Jan. 3 at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

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Coleccion Duques de Alba

The presence of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Girl With Hat With Cherries (1880) shows the diversity of art within the House of Alba’s collection.

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Biblioteca de los Duques de Alba

The exhibition “Treasures From the House of Alba” also displays the Bible of the House of Alba from the early 15th century. It is a parchment manuscript with 513 folios; the exterior is fi nished in the Mudejar style. The exhibition continues through Jan. 3.

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Coleccion Duques de Alba

Christopher Columbus’ list of the people who went on his 1492 journey of discovery was recorded on Nov. 16, 1498.

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Private Collection, on loan to The Art Institute of Chicago

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’ Portrait of the Duke of Alba is dated circa 1795. It is part of the exhibition “Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting” at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Meadows Museum chose to celebrate its 50 years in conjunction with SMU's Centennial by mounting two large exhibitions from important private collections in Spain.

If you go

“Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting,” through Jan. 3, Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas

Admission: $12.

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday; 1-5 p.m. Sunday.

Information: (214) 768-2516; meadowsmuseumdallas…

Neither collection had been shown in large exhibition form, even in their native country, and the Meadows' Spanish-born director, Mark Roglan, parlayed the Meadows' own prestige as the "Prado of the Prairie" to persuade two Spaniards, Juan Abello and Carlos Fitz-James Stuart, the 19th Duke of Alba, to part with major works from their collections for the successive exhibitions.

Why two collections and why show them successively? They are a complete contrast as collections. The Abello was formed by a wealthy family in the past generation from purchases made in Spain and on the international art market.

The Alba, by contrast, was formed by 18 successive dukes over five centuries. Some of the dukes and duchesses bought works themselves and others made strategic marriages so that important collections formed by others came to the House of Alba through dynastic alliances.

The exhibitions are successive because both collections are so large and lent so many works that it was impossible to hold them simultaneously. But, visitors to both can immediately tell the difference between a modern capitalist collection and a dynastic aristocratic one.

The Abello Collection at the Meadows (which closed in August) had no family portraits, no representations of family palaces, no documents of ducal titles, no family Bible.

By contrast, the Alba Collection, which shows at the Meadows through Jan. 3, has all those things, plus tapestries, a few large baroque paintings and comparatively few works of modern art. Many works in the Alba Collection could fit only on huge palace walls, while those in the Abello Collection are scaled for modern living spaces.

What I took away from both is that, unlike the permanent collections of the Kimbell Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art or the Meadows Museum, neither was professionally curated by trained art historians. What was bought or inherited is simply what one family liked or was able to acquire without any concerted attempt to give the collection an art historical shape.

Hence, there are many works by minor artists in both collections, and there are old master paintings in the Alba exhibition that exist in several other versions or are copies of other works of art, something that modern art museums try to avoid in their purchases.

Although this is disconcerting to viewers who know old master paintings from the collections of major museums, it is, in some ways, also a revelation. The Abello Collection has more wonderfully fresh paintings by comparatively minor Spanish artists than does the Meadows Museum itself, though certain of the paintings by important non-Spanish artists -- Canaletto, Bonnard, Braque, Leger, Matisse and Chagall -- are no more significant than works by those artists in the Dallas Museum of Art or the Kimbell in Fort Worth.

The highlights of the Abello exhibition were outright masterpieces by Juan de Flandes, Jusepe de Ribera, Degas, Picasso, Modigliani and Francis Bacon -- a disparate group of works that glowed like jewels in the Abello show and would look equally at home at the Dallas Museum of Art or the Kimbell.

Of the Alba Collection, a good many of the paintings relate to the history of this distinguished family and those with whom they made alliances through marriage. Although certain of these are of wonderful quality, many are routine works interesting more for genealogists or historians than for art lovers.

Fascinating exceptions are two Rubens copies after paintings by Titian as well as three splendid Alba family portraits by Goya. These works and the many others are so important to the story of the family and its collecting that, in conjunction with the fascinating manuscripts and documents in the exhibition, they are ample fodder for anyone interested in Spanish history and its global reach -- particularly of the 16th through 18th centuries.

In the Alba collection itself, there is a smattering of Greco-Roman sculpture of lesser quality than the Dallas Museum of Art or Kimbell, but the big room of the collection's best contains a handful of outright masterpieces, crowned by a never-before-loaned central panel of an altarpiece by the early Italian Renaissance master called Fra Angelico.

The Virgin's chubby, complacent face and the equally well-fed Christ child look out at us from a throne covered by a gorgeously painted gold cloth held aloft by two angels, banishing all thoughts of a manger or dirty animals or, for that matter, Joseph.

Fascinatingly, the Albas collected works by female artists of the Italian baroque, and there is a lascivious painting of Venus and Mars by Lavinia Fontana and a pair of pictures by Elisabetta Sirani of the Virgin Annunciate and the angel Gabriel, which are united at the Meadows because the two are kept in different Alba family palaces in Salamanca and Madrid.

Favorites in the exhibition are portraits by Palma Vecchio, Anton Raphael Mengs, Francisco Goya and Franz Xaver Winterhalter, but there are many other highlights, including a very strange set of oil sketches for mural paintings commissioned for the Chicago mansion of Charles Deering done by the Spanish painter Josep Maria Sert.

Perhaps the greatest rarity is a historical painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a French neoclassical master unrepresented in Dallas-area permanent collections. Installed next to a drawing by Ingres called preparatory, but more likely made after it, the painting glows, and the many beautifully painted figures are presided over by the 18th-century Spanish King Philip V, who bestows the Order of the Golden Fleece on an Alba ancestor, Marshall Berwick. Bought directly from Ingres, the painting has almost never left the Liria Palace in Madrid.

Visitors to the Alba exhibition would benefit from buying the catalog, Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting, edited by Fernando Checa Cremades, former director of the Prado Museum. The $65 hardcover book is the work of major Spanish scholars and is translated clearly into English. The beautifully illustrated book tells the larger story of the Alba family and its collection, as well as the works in the exhibition.

Rick Brettell is the founding director of the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Travel on 11/01/2015

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