Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Since its completion in 1997 the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, has unceasingly worked its magic. The economic impact of this extraordinary structure was immediate, drawing in so many visitors that, within four years, the $100 million spent by regional and local authorities on its construction had been recouped in taxes. This is a consequence of the so-called ‘Guggenheim Effect’, whereby Bilbao’s previously run- down, post-industrial urban landscape has been transformed into an elegant and inspirational city destination – an unmissable attraction on any grand tour of the world’s modern cultural centres.
The building itself is a protean architectural wonder, rightly hailed as a singular masterpiece. As Herbert Muschamp wrote when it first opened, the Guggenheim Bilbao is ‘a sanctuary of free association. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman. It’s a ship, an artichoke, the miracle of the rose’ (The New York Times, 7 September 1997). Built in Bilbao’s former port district on the south bank of the Nervión river, the museum engages in constantly shifting dialogues with flowing water, changing skies and the bustling urban scene. Viewed from the waterside, its seeming jumble of shapes and mass of titanium plates resemble a ship or a vast fish. Approached from the city, sporadically bright and cloudy reflective titanium is juxtaposed with glass and Andalusian sandstone. There is also an indigo-painted patch of windowed facade that invokes an almost domestic character that is affectionately parodied in Jeff Koons’s thirteen-metre high Puppy (a West Highland terrier made of steel, soil and flowering plants), sitting sphinx-like at the entrance.
Exuberantly embodying the ‘spirit of freedom’ (as Muschamp also says), subjective responses are woven into the fabric of the Guggenheim Bilbao because this modern museum is not in any sense an empty box for the display of artworks. The building’s purpose is not to create a neutral void in which paintings and sculptures can be objectively placed. Rather, it is a play with space that pointedly intrudes upon consciousness, interacting both with the museum’s contents and its surroundings in ways that vigorously stimulate the imagination.
Light is shed upon what all this implies by the museum’s most celebrated exhibit: Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time (1994–2005), consisting of eight huge sculptures made from five-centimetre thick sheets of weatherproof steel, displayed in The Arcelor Gallery. Named after the company that sponsored it (now merged with Mittal Steel), the sheer size of this gallery is stupendous: a hundred and thirty metres long by twenty-four wide. As Robert Hughes writes, however, Serra’s Matter of Time takes charge of this immense room ‘like a rhinoceros in a parlour’ (The Guardian, 22 June 2005).
You can survey Serra’s installation from a balcony in the Guggenheim’s atrium (an amazing achievement in itself), but you learn very little merely by looking. You have to get inside it, pursue the lines of the torqued ellipses, follow the snaking curves and spirals, allow your progress to be governed by the shapes, which disorientatingly guide you in and round and out, along and through. As you do so, you’re acutely aware that these enormous objects, weighing many tons, remain standing only because Serra has correctly done the sums. They are not fixed, but carefully balanced – gravitational happenings, so to speak.
This tight, sculptural poise generates momentum. Enter the first Torqued Spiral, follow the walls that lean away from you, and you quickly, unwittingly, gain speed. Immediately growing accustomed to treating the steel sheets as though they might be perpendicular, you soon learn to accommodate the resulting loss of balance by quickening your stride. Pacing the spiral becomes a controlled fall, like sprinting – an unconsummated tumble that harnesses gravity to produce a forward motion which carries you into a central enclosure, then round and out along the same accelerating line, but now in reverse.
The Matter of Time momentarily undermines the saving illusions of straight lines and dependable stasis. Serra’s artworks shape the space they contain, reminding the visitor that that’s how space itself actually is – not static and empty, but full of forces like the sea; carving out time’s trajectory like an arrow in flight. These sculptures are not afraid to confront big issues; nor, with their narrow passages and leaning masses, do they shrink from being unsettling. As Robert Hughes writes, the ‘sheer courage of these pieces is breathtaking’. The experience of the installation is not sombre, however, but exhilarating. People emerge with smiles on their faces; children find the sculptures thrilling. It’s a little bit like a fairground ride except you’re far more than a bundle of sensations, passively seated in the machine. You’re an active participant, a collaborator. Your experience, as Serra says, is an essential component of the work.
A five-minute walk away from the Guggenheim is Bilbao’s Fine Arts Museum. Though not at all stuffy or staid, this is an altogether more traditional kind of museum than the Guggenheim. Since the Fine Arts Museum was established a hundred years ago the building that houses the collection has grown organically. A neoclassical core (dating from the late 1930s) and a modernist extension in the style of Mies van der Rohe (completed in 1970) were unified in 2001 by architect Luis Uriarte as part of a rationalising overhaul that added significantly to the museum’s exhibition spaces and amenities. The collection is made up of over ten thousand pieces (paintings, sculptures, works on paper and applied arts), dating from the twelfth century to the present, advertised under the neat slogan: ‘A Hundred Years of History, Ten Centuries of Art.’
Hanging on a wall devoted to Gothic art in the Fine Arts Museum are two paintings by another Serra: Pere (in Catalan) or Pedro, who lived and worked on the other side of the Iberian peninsula in Catalonia, and is documented from about 1343 to 1405. Pere Serra was the third of four brothers, sons of a tailor and all painters, who ran an important workshop in Barcelona that flourished during the second half of the fourteenth century, surviving into the fifteenth. Very little is known about the Serra atelier. In 1357 Pere is recorded as being apprenticed to Ramón Destorrents (fl. 1351–91); the apprenticeship probably ceased in 1362 when Pere’s eldest brother, Francesc (as it is written in Catalan), died of plague; in 1363 Pere was working on commissions with the second Serra brother, Jaume (Jaime), who was then presumably in charge of the family business.
As is to be expected, Pere Serra’s works exclusively treat religious subjects. Principal survivors from his oeuvre include Madonna of the Angels (c. 1385, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), the stunning central panel (196 x 130 cm) of a predella, commissioned for the Cathedral of Tortosa that shows Mary and the infant Jesus flanked by six angels playing musical instruments; and The Retable of the Holy Spirit (1394, in situ in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Manresa Cathedral), a polyptych whose centrepiece depicts Mary, the Apostles and other followers of Christ with the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a white dove at Pentecost.
One of the smaller panels of The Retable of the Holy Spirit in Manresa Cathedral shows St Peter preaching and this is also the subject of one of the two pictures in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. Indeed, the similarities between the two pictures are great enough to suggest that they are likely to have been painted at a similar date, with the Bilbao version perhaps slightly later. The two Bilbao paintings (illustrated) are smaller panels taken from the retable of the high altar of the church of St Peter at Cubells, 140km west of Barcelona. As befits the dedication of the church, the retable’s large centre-piece (now in a private collection in Barcelona) shows St Peter enthroned.
Josep Gudiol (Pintura Gótica Catalana, 1986, p. 59, cat. 142) and Chandler Post (History of Spanish Painting, 1933, vol. 4, pp. 522–4) list a series of surviving scenes from Pere Serra’s Cubells retable, all depicting important episodes in the life of St Peter. As is usually the case in medieval art, Serra supplements details taken from the New Testament account of St Peter’s life with scenes deriving from Apocryphal sources: the second-century Acts of Peter and the Acts of Peter and Paul or Passion of Peter and Paul, dating from the fourth century. These deal with Peter’s later life, including his journey to Rome where he meets with St Paul, converts many Romans, comes into conflict with the charlatan Simon Magus, and is eventually crucified by the Emperor Nero or his magistrate Agrippa.
St Peter Preaching shows the saint standing on a rostrum in a plain but finished interior (perhaps representing a basilica), addressing a group of sixteen beautifully dressed men and women who seem to be sitting or kneeling while Peter speaks. Whereas Peter’s robes, halo and bare feet depict him in traditional guise as a figure from the time of Christ, his audience is made up of gorgeously apparelled, well-to-do members of contemporary high society. Similarly, Peter’s haloed portrait is rather iconic in style. Perhaps recalling the more stylised manner of a previous generation of painters, his features appear ever so slightly stiff and linear in a way that subtly differentiates his face from the softer, more naturalistic faces of his listeners. The implication of these details is not that the saint himself has miraculously shown himself to Pere Serra and his contemporaries, but that the Christian message Peter teaches is as vitally fresh and alive in fourteenth-century Spain as it was in first-century Rome.
Gesture is eloquent in this picture. Peter points up with his left hand, down with his right. Heaven or hell, he seems to be saying: the choice is yours. The woman on the right with her red headband and embroidered dress of burnished green listens with rapt attention, her eyes fixed on the saint. With her hand on her heart she shows how his words have touched her emotions and filled her with humility. Her left hand holds a dangling ribbon as though it were a string of rosary beads. The man in the foreground in his magnificent, ornamented robe of midnight blue rests his hand on his knee and wears his chain of office backwards, between his shoulder blades, as though worldly ambition and the need for action have momentarily been set aside. Was it sometimes common practice to position the chain like that (as a mark of respect in church perhaps) or is Pere Serra making a particular point? By contrast, to take one familiar example, Hans Holbein’s well- known portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527, Frick Collection, New York) draws attention to the Tudor rose on More’s livery chain, but Holbein’s image is about the man, Serra’s is about the message.
What of the bearded elder in orange under St Peter’s elbow who catches the viewer’s eye and holds his right hand up with his palm open and fingers slightly bent? He seems less interested in what Peter is saying than in what is happening outside the picture, in the real space occupied by the viewer. Is he telling us with his gesture and meaningful glance to pause and think about the saint’s words or is he expressing scepticism? Either way, this figure draws the viewer into the scene, adding energy and extending the idea of moral choices conveyed by Peter’s sign language to the world beyond the confines of the picture frame.
According to the Apocryphal lives, St Peter’s oratory had a particularly strong effect on Roman married women. Nero’s wife Libia, the four concubines of Agrippa the magistrate, Xanthippe the wife of Nero’s friend Albinus, along with many other Roman ‘matrons’ are said to have been converted under Peter’s influence and to have embraced a life of chastity which outraged their powerful husbands. That narrative is surely an ingredient in the depiction of most of the women in St Peter Preaching, but what are we to make of the woman in pink, wearing a white wimple, who turns to glance at the viewer, the tilt of her head suggesting a fetching demure- ness? Like the man in orange this sad-eyed but coquettish figure brings a dramatic immediacy to the image that complicates the basic message, instilling the pictorial and religious argument with a sense of urgency that extends out from the framed image into the world of the viewer.
Pere Serra was painting at a transitional moment in the history of northern Spanish art. The Franco-Gothic style (as Chandler Post describes it), which predominated in Catalonia from the last quarter of the thirteenth century, was succeeded towards the middle of the fourteenth century by a markedly Italianate trend that seems to have been imported from Siena. How this fashion travelled across the Mediterranean to the north-eastern corner of Spain (the Kingdom of Aragon as it then was) is not known. Speaking of ‘the spirit of Sienese art’ striking a chord with the Catalans because they found it ‘analogous to their own aesthetic trend’, Post’s phrasing reflects a general lack of historical data that could shed light on the process of trans- mission (History of Spanish Painting, vol. 2, p. 223). Whatever the origins of this interesting development, Pere Serra and his brothers became principal exponents of a distinctly Catalan interpretation of the Italian style.
A ‘delightful sensibility to prettiness’ (vol. 2, p. 240) is one of Post’s descriptions that I suspect most of today’s art historians would work studiously to avoid, yet it’s surely an apt way of speaking about Pere Serra’s use of colour in St Peter Preaching, with its eye-catching mix of pinks, reds, browns, and orange. The colours and the wonderful arrangement of heads and hats are certainly ‘decorative’ (to borrow another of Post’s terms), but the surface attractions are given human depth by the meaningful gestures and glances, while the dark blue mass of embroidered coat in the fore- ground, juxtaposed with the golden green of the adjacent woman’s dress and contrasting with the deep red expanse of St Peter’s cloak add dramatic power. So much so, that it is tempting to wonder whether the portrayal of the listening couple in the foreground might have a tale to tell: could these be the donors who paid for the commission or do they perhaps represent one of the high-ranking Roman couples whose marital relations were upset by Peter’s Christian message?
Although the second panel from Pere Serra’s Cubells polyptych in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is more obviously narrative in intention, it nevertheless raises numerous questions. The picture is currently known as St Peter and St Paul before the Judge. Post and Gudiol both call it The Fall of Simon Magus, and this is undoubtedly the more correct descriptive title. Simon Magus (the magician) turns up in the New Testament in Acts 8.9–24, where he tries to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from St Peter. He gives his name to the word simony (the selling of ecclesiastical privileges) and, along with all simonists, is fittingly punished in Canto XIX of Dante’s Inferno: stuck, head first, waist-deep, in a hole in the rocky ground, with his writhing legs burning forever like the wick of an unquenchable candle.
In the company of St Paul, Peter encounters Simon Magus again in Rome, where the sorcerer has gained the trust of Nero. Aping Christ, Simon tricks the emperor into believing he has risen from the dead. According to the Acts of Peter and Paul (trans. Alexander Walker, 1916), when Peter and Paul get the better of him in public disputation Simon decides to prove he is a god by dramatically taking to the skies. He climbs a high tower that has been specially built in the Campus Martius. Then, crowned with laurels, Simon stretches out his arms and astonishes the emperor and the watching crowds by flying through the air. Paul urges Peter: ‘Do at once what thou doest.’ Peter, ‘looking steadfastly against Simon’, invokes the aid of God and the risen Christ to cause the ‘angels of Satan, who are carrying him in the air … to let him go’ and the miscreant fatally crashes down to earth in the Sacra Via.
This is the scene that is partially shown in the second Bilbao panel. St Peter stares up at Simon, praying for his downfall, while St Paul looks on. Members of the crowd are shown in attitudes of dismay and surprise. The large truncated figure on the low podium to the left, wearing pointed red shoes and another midnight blue robe is Nero. (An embroidered gold crown can be made out near the hem of his garment by his right foot.) An adjacent panel to the left, now missing, almost certainly contained the rest of Nero’s portrait along with a tower (probably a spindly one) and Simon Magus falling through the air. The episode is splendidly represented in mosaic in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo in Sicily (begun c. 1143) and repeated in the cathedral at nearby Monreale (1180s). Closer to home, as Post mentions (vol. 4, p. 522), Pere Serra’s younger contemporary Lluís Borrassà includ- ed Simon’s fall in a retable painted for the church of St Peter at Terrassa, 30km north-west of Barcelona (1411–13, see Gudiol, cat. 204).
The tale of Simon Magus is a fascinating one that reaches out far beyond the basic doctrinal message contained in the Acts of Peter and Paul. Typo- logically, the tower that provides Simon with his launch pad brings to mind the Tower of Babel, while his assertion that he is a god recalls Lucifer. His flight and fall also have classical associations, turning him into a first-cen- tury Icarus. The doctrines that Simon preached (refuted by Peter, accord- ing to the early Christian sources) were collected into a body of teachings that make him an important Gnostic thinker: the Church Fathers regarded him as the ‘father of all heresy’ (Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 1958, p. 103). Most interestingly, his story has filtered indirectly into modern
consciousness via its influence on the Faust myth, retold by Marlowe and Goethe. Not only was Simon a magician who could command devils (as is seen in the Acts of Peter and Paul when he flies), he also went by the nickname ‘Faustus’, the favoured one, and travelled with a woman named Helena who he said was Helen of Troy reborn.
How much of this colourful history may be encoded in Pere Serra’s account of Simon is difficult to establish. What is certain, however, is that the purposeful way in which Pere Serra plays with the relationship between his painted surface and the real space for which his pictures were intended, particularly in St Peter Preaching, reveals a highly developed pictorial culture. Harnessing colour, form and narrative content, Pere Serra’s Bilbao panels are infused with an intriguing energy, built on the interaction between artwork and viewer, that is a recurrent feature of western art. The fact that the work of two Serras can be found in Bilbao, separated by a five-minute walk and 600 years of history, is a delightful accident. That they are both concerned, in their radically different ways, with exploring the dynamics of their viewers’ responses is no accident at all.
Many thanks to María Amezaga Mass (Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts), Mireia Berenguer i Amat (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), and Emile van Binnebeke (Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussels). Paul Williamson’s new book, Ekphrasis: Serra, an illustrated study of the sculpture of Richard Serra in blank verse, is available from Gagosian.
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