Pedro G. Romero, commissioner of the exhibit
‘La noche española. Flamenco, vanguardia y cultura popular’. Interview

“Flamenco and the avant-gardes have the same route; they’re equally modern”

Silvia Calado. Madrid, February 2008

Flamenco is living a historic moment these days. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, one of the main contemporary art galleries in the world, has opened its doors to the jondo. The exhibit ‘La noche española. Flamenco, vanguardia y cultura popular’ brings together Miró, Picasso, Man Ray, Ramón Montoya, La Argentina and Vicente Escudero all in one place. And rightfully so, since as Pedro G. Romero, commissioner of the exhibit together with Patricia Molins, explains, “the imaginarium of flamenco and modernity has been cooked up with the same materials”. Over four hundred pieces attest to it which will be at the Petit Palais in Paris next summer, among them, quite a bit of previously unseen material. A journey in which, as Romero recommends, “you have to lose yourself”.

Some newspapers have gone on about “gypsy dresses”. What does the exhibit ‘La noche española’ display?

	Pedro G. Romero (Photo Daniel Muñoz)

I was worried about explaining the flamenco part well because there are a great many misunderstandings and a great many clichés. And from what I can see, clichés are modernized but they continue to be clichés. The exhibit isn’t about flamenco dancing, it isn’t about the avant-garde, it isn’t about popular culture, but it does move in a triangle in which those three things coexisted. The subtitle ‘flamenco’ makes many people think of a type of ethnographic or anthropological exhibit, but it isn’t. The exhibit tries to clear up something which seemed obvious. And it’s like Poe’s stolen letter, which nobody could find because it was on top of the table. It seems incredible that it’s the first time the subject has somehow been approached, and it’s the constant presence in the early days of modern art, all the classical avant-garde until surrealism, of elements which have to do with the construction of the Spanish which, throughout the period encompassed by the exhibit (from 1865 to 1936), evolves a lot. And during this period is when flamenco appears. The exhibit is large; it has a great many materials, but for everything it touches on, it has to be necessarily landscape art. And what it relates is all that construction of the Spanish, how it gets interrelated, how it isn’t merely anecdotal but rather substantial in the case of many artists. What I most expect from this exhibit... are the ones remaining to be done.

With such a broad exhibit, what was the previous work like of gathering and choosing pieces?

Natalia Goncharova, 'Costume espagnole', 1916

It took nearly a year... And a whole lot has been left out; for example, the part from Russia. Exhibits have a limit and a four-hundred-piece exhibit seemed like a lot to me, and I’m a bit exaggerated myself. All of this begins, on the one hand, with the text by Ángel González García ‘La noche española’. He already tried to do another exhibit, but with his central thesis of excess. And although we started from there, ours has its own course: it maintains the same question about what is Spanish, but it opens the possibility to many answers. The representation of flamenco in the avant-garde appears at moments of crisis. When the naturalisms go into crisis and Impressionism arises, Manet paints all the flamencos: La Lola de Valencia, the guitar maker, the ballets, the portraits of bullfighters... When Picasso is passing all the Impressionisms and Expressionisms towards Cubism, representations appear of the Spanish, of flamencas, of ‘manolas’, of tocaores... And the exhibit came at a time of crisis at the museum, even without a director, so many things have been hard. I hope that when the exhibit goes to the Petit Palais in Paris in July, all the audio part is recovered which couldn’t be done here due to technical difficulties. There are nearly three hours of audio running throughout the exhibit with recordings of written European or American cult music, things that come from Spanish folk music and flamenco, and things that come from written Spanish cult music. Antonio Chacón’s cante or that of La Niña de los Peines would need a certain presence there.

The other way around is also shown; that is, how the avant-gardes affect flamencos...

Of course. My idea is that flamenco and the avant-gardes have the same route; they’re equally modern. We place the beginning in Manet’s journey to Spain in 1865 - which many consider the beginning of modernity - and in the return of Silverio Franconetti and his presentation in Seville, which many consider to be the beginning of flamenco. And the points in common are really obvious. It isn’t that the avant-garde feeds on flamenco, but it does use it a lot, and obviously, flamenco as a popular, urban art form complies a lot with the relationship with its customers, with the audience’s taste. And it interacts with the taste of the masses and with the taste of specialists or fans, who were like the ‘connoisseurs’ of avant-garde painting. And their taste was decisive in the construction of flamenco. In fact, Machado, Bécquer and Ferrand are that type of vision and they build that type of audience, the Machados also do it, it’s in Lorca and Falla, and later on it’s continued to be in Mairena and Ricardo Molina. Radicalism has always been built, a supposed purity or a supposed primitivism from that demand in which there wasn’t really much truth. The 1922 Cante Jondo Contest in Granada was clear on that. Really, Falla and Lorca were disappointed in the sense that El Tenazas de Morón wasn’t exactly the image they had of how great flamenco was. Having Chacón and La Niña de los Peines there on the panel of judges, making up that entire discourse in front of those great artists who were triumphing on stages, trying to seek where that jondo, deep thing was, which was El Tenazas in the end... didn’t add up for them. At least they kept the mythology of Caracol Jr., then it was Caracol Sr. Lorca changed his position radically; he saw that a lot of the mythology they were building was wrong and he was a bit reactionary. He realizes that the one singing is La Niña de los Peines and what he’s most interested in about flamenco lies within her.

There are two figures which especially stand out at the exhibit: Vicente Escudero and La Argentina.

	Vicente Escudero, by Edward Weston

They did star in important stories with the avant-garde, in which they were autonomous and producers of their own esthetics. And they’re two figures... Vicente Escudero used to be a little exaggerated saying that “while La Argentina is still in Zuloaga I’m already in Picasso”. It’s a little bit the fruit of the avant-garde virus which began, in which some had to outdo others. Of course, Vicente Escudero died poor because with the taste back then, being Picasso wasn’t a great value to sell yourself with. La Argentina goes into Spanish dance, and she takes it from there to international dance, the same type of revolution as Isadora Duncan. She naturalizes baile, turns it into something choreographic, stylizes it and not just flamenco dances, but also American or Spanish dances. That entire willing construction occurs which is in a documentary in the exhibit in which she is seen traveling everywhere from hamlets in the Salamanca area watching old couples dance, to the Philippines or the United States in search of dances. She dies on July 18th, 1936, which is very significant, since she was the emblematic artist of the Republic. She was a cultured artist, admired by intellectuals, but with great pull in her shows, an example of the modern woman, who used to do what she felt like, even esthetically, the way she dressed, so distant from the idea of the determined ‘flamencona’, which was Pastora Imperio’s role in those times.

And then Vicente Escudero, who is the stranger case, due to his tie to the avant-gardes as the constitution of his baile. The strategic relationship he establishes with audiences is important. Without this being a demerit or taking truth away from his work, things he presented as extremely radical due to the avant-gardes, at other times he presented as extremely radical due to tradition. All of a sudden, when war breaks out in Europe and he has to stay in Spain, the Spanish Civil War has ended and there’s the current of valuing flamenco along the lines of Falla and Lorca, he embarks upon that project of seeking the essences. And later when he does the decalogue, which he really does too late, it will be very related to Molina and Mairena, so paradoxically nothing matches, since he was the opposite of Antonio Ruiz. There are some very significant esthetic divorces. And to me Escudero is really someone the exhibit is to be based on. There’s a determination that he’s a painter. And as a painter he has interesting things if we see them in terms of his bailes, but not as autonomous painting. He’s an unbelievable modern dance artist.

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