A slow, steady hand
A methodical Spanish painter has his first major US show at the MFA
MADRID - Antonio López García smiles when he hears the good news. The two enormous bronze heads he sculpted of his grandchildren will be placed on the front lawn of the Museum of Fine Arts. What better way to mark the 72-year-old Spanish artist's first solo museum show in the United States?
He's told about the number of people who will see the works because they will face Huntington Avenue.
The artist doesn't seem impressed. Sitting in his home in the Spanish capital, he studies a map of Boston laid out on a table in front of him. He is thinking about light.
"It would be good to have the one with the open eyes on the east, the other on the west," he says through a translator and then points. "Aqui, aqui, muy bien."
That the heads will rest in such a prominent spot speaks to the high profile this exhibit will bring López García in the United States. In Spain, he is the acclaimed realist who has a commission to paint the royal family. Here he's virtually unknown. His most recent show in the States took place more than 20 years ago at New York City's Marlborough Gallery.
But López García was clearly in no hurry to commit to this exhibit, which will feature more than 50 of his paintings, sculptures, and drawings.
"It took weeks, and lots of e-mails," says Cheryl Brutvan, the MFA's curator of contemporary art. "He's not too interested in exhibiting his work. He wants to do this work, and that takes time. The fact that some people don't know about him doesn't bother him."
Just under 5 feet 3 inches tall and with only a rim of white hair remaining, López García bears a striking resemblance to one of his heroes, Pablo Picasso. That's where the comparisons should end. As an artist, he is known for capturing scenes from life with mathematical precision. As a person, he lives with little of the fame, and none of the familial chaos, that surrounded Picasso.
López García and his wife, Maria, met in the 1950s when they both attended art school. His two daughters and four grandchildren live in the same neighborhood, an upper-middle-class stretch of Madrid known as Chamartín. A 10-foot wall surrounds his property, which is split between his home and his studio.
There, nearly every surface is covered with work of some kind, from grapefruit-size models of baby heads to foot-tall figure studies and sculptures of his daughters - works long in progress, based on giant photographs from the 1980s that are tacked to one wall. Brushes and plaster mix are neatly stored within reach.
On a recent morning, López García arrives for an interview with a bag slung over his shoulder and quietly slides into a seat at a small round table in his den. He speaks no English, which means a translator is required for the interview.
In person, he looks much as he did in the 1992 documentary "Dream of Light (El Sol del Membrillo)," which charted his painful attempt to paint a fruit tree in his backyard. He smiles when asked about his low profile.
"It's not due to modesty," says López García. "It is because I've only had a few exhibits. Picasso was a fast artist, and that's wonderful if you can move fast. But if you don't produce a lot, the really important thing is that you earn enough to live off of and continue working. And I haven't really tried to get anything beyond that. You don't need all those exhibits. I like the way things have gone."
Things have gone slowly and deliberately, according to a clock that appears disconnected from the demands of the art market. López García is driven by an unyielding faith in the mysterious forces that lead to creative breakthroughs. That applies to the lonely portraits he's created of bathroom sinks and dinner tables. It also applies to the sprawling views of Madrid that are painted in such detail that, if you look closely, it's possible to see the pencil marks he has made on the canvas to make sure he has added the proper number of floors to each building.
López García prefers to set up his easel directly in front of his subjects, whether it's the city skyline or the refrigerator in his kitchen, and he has worked on some pieces for years, off and on. The most dramatic example of this organic approach will be on view at the MFA: "Hombre y Mujer," a pair of life-size wooden sculptures, started in 1968 but not completed until 1994.
"These are things you can't control," he says of his pace. "I would have liked to have gotten quicker but I couldn't make that choice. It wasn't up to me. I would have liked to have had more money, exhibits - everything would have been better that way, but it's just something you don't have any control over."
'I want to show the wonder'
López García has no complaints. He has done well for the son of a farmer from Tomelloso, a town south of Madrid. As a boy, he showed he had a special ability to paint. His uncle, a frustrated but committed artist, recognized that talent and encouraged López García's parents to send him to Madrid. They did, and at 13, in 1949, the boy enrolled at the School of Fine Arts. For much of his adult life, the city has remained his home.
The Spain of his youth was relatively isolated because of the authoritarian regime of General Francisco Franco. As an artist, López García also remained out of step with the Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists who thrived elsewhere in the 1950s and '60s. When Andy Warhol was painting soup cans, López García created a sculpture of a clothes rack and painted a still-life of a sideboard.
"His work appeared at a time when realism was not fashionable," says Elvira Cámara, curator at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, which has 28 of López García's works in its collection. "He stayed true to his convictions and his way of looking at life and painting, and his prestige has been growing little by little. It's based on reflection, study, and work."
He wasn't ignored, receiving New York gallery shows in 1965 and 1968, but he also wasn't fully embraced. It wasn't until the 1980s that López García drew the praise from the big-name art critics that he says helped him score important shows in Spain.
Robert Hughes, writing in Time in 1986, singled López García out as "the greatest realist artist alive." Cámara describes an "unsettling serenity" in his work that, she says, gives it "a halo of enigma."
The MFA's connection to López García came through Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell, a pair of New York doctors whose collection went to the museum in 2003 after their deaths. The gift included eight López García works.
The artist says he agreed to the MFA show in part because it will run alongside the museum's blockbuster "El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III," which features works from Madrid's Prado Museum. Not only does López García love many of the artists in the MFA show, he serves as a trustee of the Prado.
López García struggles to explain his own creative process. Why is one piece completed, another abandoned? How does he know when a painting or sculpture works? His answer, he confesses, is not easy to put in words. Essentially, he keeps plugging away until, at a certain point, a piece develops the energy that helps it transcend a mere photograph.
"I try to transmit this deeper, intimate feeling through my art," he says. "It's not just showing things. It can be a mystery, this process of expressing that deepness, that inner feeling."
"I find it easy to talk," López García continues, "but I know there is a limit for explaining things."
As an example, he points out that he likes to go to the Prado and stare at "Las Meninas," the famous Velazquez painting in which the artist gazes out from the frame as he works amid a crowded room of subjects and observers. He does not want an art-history lecture on the meaning of the work. The experience of gazing at the picture is enough.
"I don't want to see any written words explaining," López García says. "Artists paint the painting. Usually they don't feel the need to explain the painting."
So how to explain the giant heads, each weighing a ton, created by a man whose work is usually the definition of understated?
"Why did man create the Sphinx?" he asks. "That grandiosity, the largeness of sculpture, has had such importance through history. Art tries to depict that wonder that man views. I want to show the wonder. The city, for example, is just like the big head. There's something monstrous about the city landscape and threatening, but at the same time it's marvelous."
Time and a quince tree
López García keeps a hand-written piece of paper tacked to a wall inside his house. It lists about two dozen projects, along with a column updating his progress, from those completed to those still in the idea stage.
"I would like to do people shaving themselves," he says. "Women washing their hair and their faces. People eating, people bathing. People doing everyday things, like a movie. I would want to do real people. I'd like to express violence but I'm afraid of doing that. I feel the violence that's out in the world and I would like to paint that explicitly."
Will he have time? In "Dream of Light," López García attempts to paint a quince tree in his backyard. The 133-minute film, which the MFA will screen April 17 and 19, shows the artist in all of his detail-obsessed glory.
He nails metal posts slightly larger than golf tees into the ground at the foot of his easel so his dirty loafers slide into position each day. He ties up a string vertically in front of the tree to create a reference point and, even more curiously, brushes paint on the increasingly swollen fruit to allow him to see every millimeter it drops lower on the bough. He smokes as he works, or when work stops (he has since kicked the habit). He battles torrential downpours and the cold, all in an effort to capture the beauty of the light hitting the fruit. And then he fails. During the film, López García decides he simply can't capture this moment. He abandons the canvas.
Watching "Dream of Light," the curator Brutvan thought of another realist who worked directly with his subjects, she says: the 19th-century French artist Gustave Courbet, who once declared: "Show me an angel, and I'll paint one."
López García was not upset that he didn't finish the work. In the film, he says he appreciated his time with the quince tree.
Sixteen years later, the artist is asked whether his feelings have changed. He shakes his head.
"Painting gives me the feeling of love," he says. "It allows me to relate to my surroundings. Studio painting is very different from my way. There is that relation with the world, that Velázquez had, that is something wonderful and marvelous. To work as a painter is lonely but that takes you out into the world.
"No, for me," he says, "the process is more important than finishing the work."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com
