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New in the Collection Highlights: works by Axel Hütte, Miriam Cahn and Baroque painter Juan de Arellano
In our Collection Highlights section we take a look at some of the Banco de España's collection of over 4,500 pieces from very different periods, styles and formats. The idea is to turn the spotlight on some of our most significant works and also to draw attention to the great diversity of artistic heritage that the bank has acquired over more than two centuries.
In the last two updates, we looked at works by Spanish artists created between 1900 and 2010 (you can view the items here and here). This time, we want to turn our attention to a 17th century painter, Juan de Arellano, and two contemporary artists, Axel Hütte from Germany and Miriam Cahn from Switzerland.
Juan de Arellano: Vases (1660-1670)
Juan de Arellano (1614-1676) was one of the most outstanding painters of floral arrangements of the Spanish Golden Age. He achieved distinction in the genre from a very early age and had a significant influence on later artists, including his son José de Arellano (active between 1670 and 1705) and Bartolomé Pérez. Although his early works are based on Flemish models, he gradually came to draw his inspiration from Italian floral painters such as Mario Nuzzi and Margarita Caffi, whom —writes Alfonso Pérez Sánchez— "he often matches in quality". From this later period the Banco de España has two vases, both painted in the 1660s or 1670s and probably designed as a pair, as they are identical in size and only one is signed. The fact that many of the flowers are depicted wide open, on the verge of shedding their petals, their moment of glory now past, lends these pictures a certain sense of vanitas and although they have none of the often-macabre aspect so typical of the theme, they nonetheless convey a subtle moral lesson on the fragility of life and the ephemeral nature of beauty.
Axel Hütte: Yuste II (Fog) (2002)
In many ways, the same fragility and transience of life and beauty can also be seen in another of the works from our selection, Yuste II (Fog) (2002). With his characteristically detailed and clinical style, German photographer Axel Hütte (a leading light in the Düsseldorf School) depicts a natural landscape, devoid of any visible human trace but nonetheless charged with history. The photograph is of an oak grove in the La Vera region of Extremadura, to which Emperor Charles V retired after he abdicated in favour of his son Philip II. The trees are shown bathed in a thick morning mist which, as Isabel Tejada points out, means that they are at once unveiled and hidden. In this way, Hütte manages to bring both a pictorial feel and even a certain tactile dimension to the landscape, as he does in the other two of his works in the bank's collection, Yuste I (2001), taken in the same area, and Caldera Colorada (2004), which shows a volcanic landscape on the island of Lanzarote.
Miriam Cahn: On the Border (2015)
The last work we have selected is On the Border (2015), a deeply moving drawing by Miriam Cahn denouncing the horrors of war. This has been a central theme of her work since the 1990s and is also the subject of her other two drawings in the collection, Untitled (2005) and Untitled (2014). In On the Border, we see a group of silent, frightened figures fleeing through a desolate landscape that could be anywhere in the world. One of them has her head turned and is gazing directly back at the viewer with a look of terror. The immediacy of the black-and-white drawing allows Cahn to express the profound human drama of armed conflict in a profoundly direct and powerful way. As Yolanda Romero has noted, one can drawn a link between Cahn and Goya, who used the same medium to denounce the brutality of warfare and its impact on the most defenceless.