Valencian virtues
Andrew Lambirth explores the little-known delights in the capital of the Levante
Valencia is Spain's third city (after Madrid and Barcelona), but has as yet been mercifully overlooked by tourists, though recent travel articles extolling its party-style night-life may be set to change that. Certainly it is not an obvious destination for art lovers, yet it has a very decent fine arts museum (with memorable things by El Greco as well as Goya and Velasquez), a bizarre ceramics collection with one of the wildest façades in museum history, and a currently evolving but already dramatic 'City of Arts and Sciences' designed by local boy Santiago Calatrava, which when complete will comprise an arts complex with planetarium, interactive science museum and oceanographic park.
When I visited in late April, the temperature was soaring and the jacaranda trees were flowering in the streets, sending wafts of fragrance over the passing pedestrians. Valencia is the capital of the Levante (the land of the rising sun), that region between Catalonia in the north and Andalucia in the south, and traditionally the garden of Spain. It is the birthplace of paella (the special rice for the dish is grown locally) and famed for its oranges. Some claim it as the pyrotechnic capital of the world, and it's renowned for its spring festivals. The Holy Grail is kept in the cathedral, which has an alabaster-glazed lantern. The city also has IVAM (correctly pronounced `eeloam), the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, an attractive modern museum purpose-built to showcase its noteworthy permanent collection, and to mount temporary exhibitions.
The permanent collection includes an immensely distinguished body of work by Julio Gonzalez, the great sculptor who taught Picasso so much about working in three-dimensions. Although Gonzalez does not hail from Valencia, a previous director of IVAM was far-sighted enough to buy his work and encourage donations, and the museum now houses the largest concentration of his sculpture and drawings in the world. His brilliantly witty cut-metal masks are displayed in IVAM's beautiful spaces to great effect. To complement this strength is a good collection of modern art, including a strange Delaunay relief made from casein, cork and sand, a fine Helion from 1933, a couple of Schwitters reliefs and a Cornell box, and a mass of lesserknown works grouped inevitably around the highpoints of such Spanish masters as Saura. Tapies, Millares and Chillida. There are a couple of very colourful early Ad Reinhardts and a large resin floor piece of axes and chopped logs by Tony Cragg called 'Clearing'. Another gallery is devot ed to the Valencian Impressionist Ignacio Pinazo, a sort of Spanish Jeffery Camp in his exuberantly tender dabbing on small panels; wonderfully informal and immediate.
Of the temporary exhibition spaces, there is an annexe a short walk away called the Centre del Carme, a building of considerable historical interest dating back to the 13th century, once a religious foundation, and consisting of courtyards and cloisters and cool white high-ceilinged rooms. The current exhibition there, until 30 May, is a vast survey of the recent paintings and sculptures of Markus Lupertz, one of the generation of German Neo-Expressionists which includes Baselitz and Penck. Sadly, this will be the last exhibition organised by IVAM in these elegant surroundings, as the galleries are being reclaimed by the Museum of the 19th Century, which is concurrently showing works in the other half of the building from the Sorolla Museum in Madrid; Joaquin Sorolla being the other Valencian Impressionist of note beside Pinazo.
Back in the main IVAM building on Calle Guillem de Castro is a splendid sculpture hall on the ground floor for temporary displays, hosting during my visit a show of architectonic plinth-like pieces by the American Tony Smith (1912-80). But upstairs is the piece de resistance and principal reason for my visit, the newly remodelled top-lit galleries in which is hanging an impressive Ben Nicholson exhibition until 7 July. Curated by Nicholson-expert Jeremy Lewison, the show spans the entirety of the artist's career in a display of some 60 pieces, chosen with care and intelligence to illustrate the artist's trajectory from traditional still-life painter to abstract master. Not that Nicholson was ever entirely abstract as this exhibition demonstrates — he was too interested in still-life and landscape, carrying with him a much-loved collection of vessels and utensils he continued to draw and paint, and the memories of many different landscapes from Cornwall to Switzerland.
Nicholson's earliest works on view are talented exercises in the manner of his father, Sir William, although one of the paintings — 'Blue Bowl in Shadow' of 1919 — seems to have lost all the sparkle I remember and to be on the point of vanishing altogether into the shadows. The next ten years or so see him working through the various 'isms' until he found his own voice in the relief paintings of the early 1930s. Some of his experiments were more European than others, as he explored Cubism and even — tentatively — Surrealism (which explains why Tainting' of 1932 is so curiously unresolved), while others, like the gorgeous little landscape of Dymchurch done while staying with Paul Nash, are essentially English in character. But Nicholson was soon homing in on the square (or rectangle) and the circle, making himself master of the incised line and the well-orchestrated texture, and mingling drawing and painting to make his very distinctive landscape/still-fifes.
This beautifully selected and installed exhibition, which draws authoritatively on so many public and private collections, looks superb in IVAM's lovely light-filled spaces and reminds us how truly international Nicholson's mature art is. It seems incredible that, despite being heavily promoted by the British Council during his lifetime, and represented in collections nearly everywhere else as a consequence, Nicholson remains unrepresented in a single French or Spanish museum. Jeremy Lewison tells us this (and a great deal more about the somewhat puritanical Nicholson) in the handsome hard-back dual-text publication which accompanies the exhibition. Perhaps IVAM's show will change that. I can think of no more fitting sequel than the acquisition for Valencia of a quintessential Ben Nicholson to enhance IVAM's permanent collection. Any donors forthcoming?
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