BASQUE LUXURY FIRM: ZUGAZA
BASQUE LUXURY FIRM: ZUGAZA
The Basque Country, geographically and culturally, is a border country: open to external influences and, at the same time, jealous of its own conquests. The presence of artistic manifestations in the region dates back to prehistory. We recently had the opportunity to showcase, at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Ekain Plaque – a stone plaque on whose surface several hands successively engraved, one on top of the other, animal profiles (goats, reindeer, deer, etc.) with surprising realism and an unprecedented collective effort, doing all this more than 12,000 years ago. Some time later we found ourselves with the no less extraordinary phenomenon of megalithism in concentrations as large as those that were on the slopes of Mount Agiña, also a border region between the Earth and the sky, where sculptor Jorge Oteiza, in our age, knew how to find, alongside that primordial collective effort, a new idea rooted in our artistic culture: the identity between art and nature. A primal and existential idea of art that surely became even more chronic due to the slight Romanization that, comparatively, our land suffered.
As one of the main access corridors to the Peninsula from continental Europe, there are many northernly traveling artists, mainly Flemish, who came between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age to propose the forms of modernization of the international art of each moment: Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque… One of these travelers was Luis Paret y Alcázar, from Madrid, a strict contemporary of Francisco de Goya who, upon his return from his forced exile in Puerto Rico, decided to settle in Bilbao and offer the best of his talent to illuminate the artistic flourishing of the city, accompanied by economic and urban development. Pío Baroja would say, to explain the difference between the Netherlands and the Basque Country in terms of art, that in the Netherlands it flourished earlier thanks to the existence of cities.
The pioneers of Basque modernity traveled to the European capitals of art, importing the news of new international trends. Before the end of the 19th century, Guiard, Regoyos, Durrio, Zuloaga, and Iturrino inaugurated that journey of Basque art and artists that was to have no end. Generation after generation, local art has been forged from the relationship with international artistic centers: Rome first; Brussels and Paris later; Buenos Aires and São Paulo between the War and the 1960s; London and New York in the eighties; Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and other European cities today.
The cosmopolitan nature of contemporary Basque art is demonstrated, among other things, by the international significance achieved by some of its great authors: Zamacois, Zuloaga, Oteiza, Chillida, and –more recently– Cristina Iglesias; in her case, fortunately, representing the thriving presence of women in the new art forms. When her project for the lighthouse on the Santa Clara Island in San Sebastián is inaugurated shortly, that pact between art and nature that encodes the identity of Basque art before history will be rewritten.
Miguel Zugaza
Director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
