Large Garden - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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Large Garden

Balerdi, Rafael

San Sebastián, 05/05/1934-Altea, Alicante, 11/03/1992

Oil on canvas

240 x 571 cm

1966-1974

Third quarter of the 20th century

82/331

Acquired in 1982

The painter Rafael Balerdi was one of the most important Basque avant-garde artists after the Spanish Civil War. In 1955, he met Eduardo Chillida, and his friendship with the sculptor immediately brought him into contact with the languages of the international avant-garde of the time. After just a handful of far from negligible geometric paintings, his first mature work, which dates from the second half of the 1950s, was associated with lyric abstraction, with morphological and chromatic influences from Goya's black paintings and from Pablo Palazuelo's work. Within this vein, he painted works brimming with sensuality and a penetrating mystery, which even appeared in the Venice Biennale in 1958 and the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh that same year. Balerdi was part of a group of Basque artists who made fundamentally abstract creations through naturalistic paintings, according to some of the names used in Paris within the currents that appeared after World War II. This contrasts with the strict, strippeddown geometric and substantial inclination of the earlier artists from his country, like Chillida, who had made important creations in the first half of the 1950s. As mentioned above, geometry also makes a fleeting appearance in this younger group, not only in Balerdi.

In 1960, his painting embarked upon a radical, gestural Informalism made up of rhythmic, open Oriental-style marks. His sense of colour and drawing, coupled with the effective imprint of his random blotches, the musicality of his compositions, his lightness and luminosity suffused these works with a great deal of lyricism. After them, the painter subjected himself to systematic colour changes and used a brushstroke studied in Velázquez and in later Monet to embark upon a profoundly personal, risky experience which, based on the initially informal work, strove to get organic forms to emerge like a conformation in the original of natural creation itself or an energetic, ineluctable imago poiesis of the mind. With obsessive discipline, Balerdi began each work by placing gestures and blotches onto the canvas from which gradually, through constant modifications of the random features, yielded increasingly consolidated forms. This way of painting makes it difficult to establish a precise date for each work, since the discoveries or nature of the experimentation were transferred from one work to another, some of which were worked on more repeatedly, such that paintings that may have been started at the same time ended up looking extremely different. The end result of the process leaves us two fundamental series, although there are also works which are difficult to ascribe to any particular one, such as the one inspired by Picasso's Las Meninas. In one set of informal works, which come from the early years, gestures and blotches comprise the final body of the painting and mark the definitive conclusión of the initial painting actions; another is characterised by a strong formalism which came to reveal complex images crystallised in visceral or geological appearances, sometimes homunculi and others their fragments, which appeared in around 1970. The paintings that best represent this final phase were The Giants, dated from 1972; Venice, which was finished around the same time; and Large Garden. Each of the three is unique, although the genesis and results of the latter two are more similar to each other than to The Giants.

This creative cycle, this most important one in the painter's career, lasted slightly over a decade, from 1962- 1964 to 1974, virtually matching his long-term residence in Madrid. The painting Large Garden, the last fruit of this stage, was the most extraordinary because of its size, but it was completed upon the artist's return to Gipuzkoa in 1973. In the schools, in the midst of a free didactic experiment with children, he finally considered it done, although his approach, just as in Venice, both worked on directly, would have allowed for new interventions ad infinitum, especially because of their size. The experience consisted in taking the process described to its ultimate consequences, distributing it into an episode of formalisation until achieving a compositional whole of violent colours and strict definition of motifs, and later continuing with another one which sought structural relations in space while breaking down the forms achieved by faceting them and retracing with thin brush lines or pointillist dabs. The colour was also modified in these procedures. Without the imbedded harshness of Venice; with the freer formal pockets which make it more relaxed and floating; with an obvious appearance of a bejewelled plant-like unfolding despite its abstraction; with sovereign colour reminiscent of the Art Nouveau and Monet's Waterlilies, which had been present in Balerdi since 1960, Large Garden is a sum of the painter's themes and procedures, the colophon of his greatest period, and a work that for all of these reasons would herald the freest subsequent experimentation with chalk on paper, another of his most imaginative, masterful series. (Javier Viar)

Selected bibliography

  • Bengoechea, Javier de. Catálogo de arte moderno y contemporáneo del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Bilbao, Banco de Vizcaya, 1980. p. 26. (Con el título Pintura).
  • "¡Vive tu museo! = Zure Museoa bizi!", Guía de Exposiciones, n° 105. 1988.
  • Balerdi : la experiencia infinita = azkengabeko esperientzia [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao ; Donostia-San Sebastián, Rekalde Erakusketa Aretoa = Sala de Exposiciones Rekalde ; Koldo Mitxelena Erakusketaretoan = Sala de Exposiciones Koldo Mitxelena, 1993. pp. 540-542, 763, n° cat. 175.
  • De Picasso a Bacon : arte contemporáneo en las colecciones del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Segovia, Museo de Arte Contemporánea Esteban Vicente, 1999. p. 27.
  • Entre la figuración y la abstracción : arte contemporáneo en las colecciones del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Pamplona, Museo de Navarra, 1999. p. 25.
  • Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao : guía. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 196-197.
  • Ruíz-Ozaíta, María José ; Vitoria, Ana. "Lorategi Handia : formatu handiko kontserbazioa eta zaharberritzea Bilboko Arte Eder Museoan = Gran Jardín : la conservación y restauración de pinturas de gran formato en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao = Big Garden : the Conservation and restoration of large format paintigns at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum", B'05 : Buletina = Boletín = Bulletin, n° 1. 2006. pp. 139-164.
  • Bilbao Fine Arts Museum : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 196-197.
  • Musée des Beaux Arts de Bilbao : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 196-197.
  • Guía Artistas Vascos. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2008. pp. 149-151.
  • Gida Euskal Artistak. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Eder Museoa, 2008. pp. 149-151.
  • Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao : guía. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2011. pp. 196-197, n° cat. 140b.
  • Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa : gida. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2012. pp. 196-197, n° cat. 140b.
  • Guide Basque Artists. Bilbao, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, 2012. pp. 149-151, n° cat. 83c.
  • Bilbao Fine Arts Museum : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2014. pp. 196-197.
  • Musée des Beaux Arts de Bilbao : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2014. pp. 196-197.
  • Viar, Javier. Historia del arte vasco : de la Guerra Civil a nuestros días, 1936-2016. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2017. p. 302, 304.
  • 110 Años 110 Obras [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 284-287, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Ans 110 Oeuvres [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 284-287, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Urte 110 Artelan [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 284-287, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Years 110 Works [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 284-287, sin n° cat.
  • Bilboko Museoaren alfabetoa = El alfabeto del Museo de Bilbao = The alphabet of the Bilbao Museum = L'alphabet du Musée de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 213-214, 217-218.
  • Después del 68 : arte y prácticas artísticas en el País Vasco, 1968-2018 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 67, 156-157, 311, 336, 340, 500, il.
  • Viar, Javier. Hijos de la angustia. Bilbao, Muelle de Uribitarte, 2019. pp. 138-139, 144-145.
  • Balerdi, 1934-1992 [Cat. exp.]. San Sebastián, Kutxa Fundazioa, 2017. pp. 26-29, 31, 64-65, il.