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Escultura Moderna Española Con Dibujo - Colecciones I.C.O.
May 12 - July 17, 2005
Sala de Exposiciones Vimcorsa: Angel de Saavedra, 9 Cordoba
Schedule: Mon - Sat 10:30am - 1:30pm and 6:30pm - 9:30pm ; Sundays and holidays: 10:30am-2:30pm .

Joan Miró
June 13 - July 10, 2005
Sala de Exposiciones Museisticas Caja Sur: Ronda de los Tejares, 6 Cordoba
Schedule: Mon - Sat 6:00pm - 9:00pm ; Sundays and holidays: 12:00pm - 2:00pm and 6:00pm - 9:00pm.

Modern Art Comes to Cordoba with 2 Exhibitions

Vimcorsa's Exhibition Gallery has brought yet another excellent collection to Cordoba. The venue is a restored palace at the northern edge of the city's historic center. Featured are pieces in medium-sized format by artists of primary importance in Spanish modern art. Likewise, Caja Sur, in colaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró de Barcelona, has brought an important selection of Catalonian artist's paintings, sculptures, lithographs and even tapestries to display in the Caja Sur gallery, which had hosted the much more classical "Great Works of the Havana Fine Arts Museum" exhibition previously.

I must confess that I prefer the 19th-century impressionists and romantic painters and that I have never been able to comprehend the meaning of a few vague lines, a mono-color canvas or random drips, splatterings and runs.

I saw the Joan Miró exhibition in a record-breaking 14 minutes, and quickly became more intrigued by the lack of verisimilitude of the titles (most of them "Feminine Portrait" or "Head") than in the actual works of art. Miró and other modern artists continually remind me of the old "No soap. Radio!" joke. Nevertheless, the vibrant blue swaths, red circles and yellow meanderings which show us the vital essence of the feminine models who may or may not have actually posed for Miró were surprising to find in Cordoba . Miró's sculptures were even more discordant in this traditionally conservative habitat, preserved as Universal Heritage and protected, at least within the historic center's bounds, from the influences of the modernists.

I was pleasantly surprised that 2 of the pieces which I liked were chosen for the exhibition's pamphlet.

Precisely within a stone's throw of the Mosque-Cathedral, beyond automatic sliding doors and in the air-conditioned gallery which was once the Duke of Rivas's palace, I was again struck by contrasts between periods and worldviews in the Modern Spanish Sculpture and Drawings Exposition.

The first room holds the masters, and the first piece on the right is a chimney vent (Chiminea ventilador, 1909) by the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí, the only architect represented in the exhibition. The 54cm-high piece is a tiny hint of the brilliance to the nth degree which his buildings and the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona must represent.

There are three delightful ink drawings done by Gaudí in 1878 and labeled and signed with a precise, architect's hand, which represent agricultural milestones in the year: La recolecció de l'oli (Olive Harvest), La vrema (Grape harvest?) and La sega (Reaping time).

Other well-known artists represented are Juan Gris (a painted metal cut-out entitled "Harlequín", 1923) and Joan Miró (with an inevitable sculpture entitled "Femme" and consisting of a two bowed wires topped with a few small bits of metal).

Far more consistent than the latter is "Femme debout" (1961) and the ink drawing "Nu" (1934) by Pablo Picasso. Further along comes the exhibition's most curious piece , "Sin título" (Untitled, 1949), an ink drawing in which most of the space is blank, with hints of penciled subdivisions which never materialized. Two panels within this space emerge in striking, precise, black ink. Bottom center is a square depiction of a flower and a stone, on which a series of ants of varying sizes line up in a formation hinting at mathematical codes. Higher to the right, a second square jumps to life, the reclining half torso of a woman on her side, reminiscent of so many classic nudes, but slightly twisted and proportioned surrealistically so that she is both beautiful and flat enough to support a chair squarely on the small of her back. If you lean close enough, you can read in faint pencil the words "Never luk bifor" in the center of drawing. Unmistakably Salvador Dalí, as is his painted bronze sculpture "Nu féminin, hysterique et aérodinamique", in which his subject is fitted with appendages based on either shark fins or professional racing helmets for cyclists (apparently carried out between 1934-73).

The remaining artists aren't as well-known, although art lovers will want to continue in the back rooms and enjoy the cool temperatures. A pleasant, if not blatantly commercial, "Mesa Tio Pepe" by Eduardo Arroyo (1973) reminds me of a cubist still-life brought out of a canvas and into three dimensions. The tilted table supports a miniature bottle of the Tio Pepe brand of fino white wine from Jerez (called a "Sherry" in the English-speaking part of the world, and a "fino" in Spain). If Arroyo had entitled the piece "Mesa Montilla-Moriles" or "Mesa Alvear", it could have stayed on as a permanent exhibition piece.