The Revolving Door or Portrait of Begoña de la Sota - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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The Revolving Door or Portrait of Begoña de la Sota

Guezala, Antonio de

Bilbao, 11/06/1889-Bilbao, 13/09/1956

Oil on canvas

201 x 176 cm

Antonio de Guezala (bottom right hand corner)

1927

Second quarter of the 20th century

DEP644

Deposited by the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, after transfer in lieu of tax by BBK in 2003

Considered Guezala's peak work, this painting is unusual within Basque painting from the inter-war years in both its style and its title, The Revolving Door: it is an almost abstract portrait and mechanical element of modern life. Its origins lay in one of the two parties held at Bilbao's Hotel Carlton in 1927 to commemorate the figure of the painter Adolfo Guiard, with the participation of members of the crème de la crème of Bilbao society during those years, either as circumstantial actors or guests. The first one was held in the month of February, inspired by the artist's paintings and organised by the writer Manu de la Sota and the Ultraist poet Claudio de Torre. It provided a worthy closure to Alejandro de la Sota's initiative to erect a monument to Guiard in the Casilda Iturrizar Park through grassroots donations. Guezala and other members of the Association of Basque Artists, including José María de Ucelay, Genaro Urrutia, José Arrúe and Gustavo de Maeztu, soon joined the initiative to design the set and wardrobe.

These artists also took charge of staging the second soiree held by the Association of Basque Artists in May parallel to the major Guiard exhibition which was being held in their Bilbao gallery. Guezala, who was thoroughly accustomed to these affairs, also designed the colourful paper costumes of the cake-walk dancers, inspired by avant-garde Russian and Italian models, and especially the poetics of Sonia Delauney, just as the entire grand circus into which the hotel's central atrium was transformed tohost the pantomime dreamt up by Alejandro de la Sota. And, of course, another Sota sister, Begoña de la Sota, who had close ties to the art world, was also a fixture at these shows.

Guezala must surely have seen her enter the hotel lobby to attend the rehearsals, and that motion of the revolving door as Begoña de la Sota entered inspired this work, a smaller replica of which her family still owns, a gift from the artist to his model. Nor would it be strange to assume that the idea of the painting was already in its larval stagesin Guezala's mind, since the similarity between the initial frames of the F. W. Murnau film recording guests walking through the revolving door of a hotel in Berlin and this work beckon us to think that the kinetic resource may refer to both cinema and to the turn-of-the-century avant-garde models. After all, the fact is that at that time, the general trend of the return to order prevailed in Europe, which was disenchanted with the belligerence proclaimed by the likes of the Italian Futurists. At that point, a kind of eclecticism, now that Cubism had been toned down, dominated on the international scene.

For all of these reasons, we could view this Guezala painting as a compendium of the lessons that rooted his eye as a painter, since an endless list of references from the avant-gardes coalesce in him. Thus, he shows his proximity to an abstract conception in line with other attempts in which the human figure, stripped of all individuality, is integrated into the composition as yet another element, without hierarchies, among other comparable signs. The portrait is no longer interesting for its particularity but for its inclusion in the artist's visual venture, in the structure of the work, immersed in its environs.

Here, what seduces the painter is the dynamism generated by the movement of the revolving door, such that Begoña de la Sota almost disappears amidst the wings of this device. Eclipsed by the protagonism of the door, her presence is nothing more than the human counterpoint within a structure in which she, the car and the tram are transmuted into an allegory of the rapid flow of a mechanised existence.

From the central axis of the door, the composition is arranged with a succession of vertical lines running parallel to this axis, from which the diagonal planes of the wings also emerge, while in the background, the yellow tram and black car are woven into the picture. With the colour, which is spread in broad brushstrokes in a horizontal and diagonal rhythm, Guezala pushes the sense of movement and generates transparent planes which are superimposed on tonal gradations from dark ochre to yellow, broken with green, blue and black tones, which capture the light vibrations on objects caused by motion. The interplay of diagonal lines which expand in a centrifugal direction, the repetition of the vertical lines and the ellipse which capturesthe centripetal motion of the rotation are where the dynamic intention of the shapes is expressed in their infinite succession. Finally, in The Revolving Door Guezala manages to fuse the static and the dynamic and to own the avant-garde's quest to capture reality in all its complexity in motion. [Pilar Mur Pastor]

Selected bibliography

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  • Mur Pastor, Pilar. Antonio de Guezala y Ayvrie, 1889-1956 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 1991. pp. 122, n° cat. 414; pp. 117-119, 170, n° cat. 56.
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  • "Reactions to Futurism in Castille, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Portugal", International yearbook of futurism studies, Vol. 3. 2013. pp. 289-290.
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  • Generación del 14 : ciencia y modernidad [Cat. exp.]. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España ; Sociedad Estatal de Acción Cultural, 2014. p. 284, 305, n° cat. 150.
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