by Andrew Carr
(This article references some images that are monumental in scale. Click on any image to explore it in greater detail.)
Before the Bullfight is difficult to take in. At over 8 feet tall and more than 12 feet wide, it might be truer to say that it takes you in. It’s incredible to imagine a painter covering the entire surface of this canvas with their thought and attention. And it’s incredible to see photos of this painter, Joaquin Sorolla, working on location, in the open air, with brushes that look like javelins, on canvases that resemble billboards. I don’t know how much of Before the Bullfight was painted outside, but the painting has both the fresh spontaneity of a plein air work, and the considered compositional architecture of a well-planned studio piece. Sorolla is somehow able to have it both ways.
Indeed, the scene itself is poised between outside and in. It pauses on the threshold, where the warm shadows of a tunnel open out onto a cool, bright, shimmering arena. The ensemble of matadors, picadors, horses and attendants halt around this edge, half in—half out, while one of the fighters, in pink and gold, has his shoe fixed. As he waits, he finishes the last of his cigarette.
Sorolla chooses this backstage scene to fill his vast painting, not the choreography of violence waiting on the other side. Here at the end of the tunnel, an attendant crouches down in the sand, among all those feet, to take care of a practical concern, the brilliant red shirt on his back showing exactly where the light has drawn the dividing line. Everyone else—the performers, the animals, the enormous crowd beyond—must wait. The grand occasion is at the mercy of a mundane adjustment.
But it’s the matador’s cigarette that interests me most. No more than a tiny touch of white on the huge painted surface, it’s easily overlooked. Once I’ve seen it though, that touch begins to seem essential. How can I describe this cigarette? It’s like the pin that holds the moth with its massive patterned wings in place. Like the fixed point of reference at the center of this painting’s universe. All around are arranged, first in tighter orbit, the matadors like proud and colorful planets; then further out the more solemn, patient, and massive bodies of the horses. In this solar system, the cigarette marks the origin where all axes intersect. The place where attention is gathered and held.
In this structure of attention, Sorolla’s huge painting actually bears an unexpected resemblance to traditional an adoration scene. Take an early collaboration between Sandro Botticelli and his apprentice Filippino Lippi for example, now at the National Gallery in London. Here the kings’ never ending train of elegantly dressed retainers, courtiers, and horses pours into the painting in a fabulous torrent, only to halt, like Sorolla’s matadors, at the threshold of the manger, to genuflect before the smallness of the infant.
Or better yet, compare Botticelli’s later, at the Uffizi in Florence. Here the gravitational balance of the painting is even more apparent—the figures organized in concentric spheres, inner and outer circles, revolving around a minute center. Portraits of the ruling Medici family, in all their finery and flanked by their entourage, converge on the protective shadows of the manger, the horses off left just barely squeezing their heads in for a look. The reverent posture of the king in red even recalls Sorolla’s stooping attendant. And once again, at the heart of the crowd, sits the new-born on his mother’s lap, an island of security in a turbulent sea.
These same structural dynamics underpin countless adoration scenes, both before and after Botticelli’s own contributions to the genre. The form proves so reliable, in part, because it answers the needs of the scene so aptly. It takes the world’s gaze and redirects it upon the apparently marginal. The clamoring crowd is brought to an abrupt standstill, rightly transfixed by a humble center.
But in Before the Bullfight? Why should we find such a similar structure employed? Why should this small cigarette captivate the entire painting?
In the early pages of his novel Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami’s narrator notes that “when people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it, to give the viewer a sense of the object’s actual size.” The pack is like a yardstick, he says. It becomes the unit of measurement for the photo, a known reference point. I think our cigarette butt functions in a similar way—giving scale to Sorolla’s expansive scene. It is the small thing which helps make the painting enormous. And this relative sense of scale ripples outward. The cigarette is small in the hand of the matador, just as he will be small in the hand of the arena. As he holds the cigarette in his focus, so the crowd will hold him. From this minute point the hugeness of reality unfolds.
But if the cigarette provides a way to measure space (the length of a cigarette), it also provides a measure for time (the length of a smoke), with which painting has such an elusive relationship. Here, the cigarette gives the tableaux its own measured duration, suggesting how long the painted moment “lasts.” It lasts until the shoe is fixed and the cigarette burns down. Until, with a certain flourish, the matador drops it to the ground and stomps it out. And so the cigarette introduces a transitory note into this formidable painting. The thin wisp of smoke diffuses an ephemeral sense of time throughout the scene.
And this suggestion of time within the painting calls to mind something John Berger said in his description of Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance:
The light falls on her face, on her fingers, on the scales, on the pearls. The moment has been preserved. And as we realize that, the way that it has been preserved, we realize that, like every moment, it was unrepeatable. It is as though she’s holding the moment between her forefinger and thumb, on the scales of the past and the future.
In his pinched fingers the matador holds a very different moment in a strikingly similar way. While the woman’s moment seems to slip outside of time, the matador’s is charged by what comes next. It is a moment of anticipation.
In this it resembles the moment depicted in Myron’s disk thrower, where the athlete is shown just before the throw, body wound tight like a compressed spring, everything still potential energy waiting to be released. When the Matador’s moment is seen in this way, the cigarette becomes the last couple inches of a fuse, burning down towards the coming explosion.
Soon the he will stand in the center of the arena, a small, isolated speck on which all eyes and all expectations will focus. He will be both magnified and diminished by the attention. His focus will be on the bull, on manipulating its attention. Swept up in the intensity of the spectacle, he will rely on his preparation and intuition, but he will not be in control. Like an actor in a play, his gestures will provide the occasion for a sort of collective dream, from which, if everything goes well, he will awaken at the end in triumph.
There’s another painting that perfectly envisions this explosion of scale. That captures the intense exposure waiting at the end of the matador’s cigarette. It was painted by Vincent Van Gogh, from memory, while he was living and working alongside Paul Gauguin in Arles. In his painting Van Gogh chooses the point of view precisely opposite to Sorolla’s. He places us deep within the crowd, among the sweeping blue curve of clamoring spectators that wraps itself around a small yellow arena in the corner. The crowd is painted in a bristling pattern or black dashes, chalky dots, and red arrows. While on that little stage, the performers are reduced and summarized by one or two touches of the brush, just like Sorolla’s cigarette. In places the audience is fixated upon this remote performance, reaching their hands into that yellow circle as if to move the matadors about like toy figurines. Elsewhere they turn their backs to chat and gossip. The bullfight is somehow both central and peripheral, both scrutinized and ignored, all at once.
But for the brief moment in Before the Bullfight, as the matador looks at his cigarette, this dynamic is postponed. The scale imposed by the arena is temporarily held at bay. For the duration of this painted time, he is himself, still his own size. He gets to observe. And he looks at his cigarette. The small, distinct thing to which he can anchor his attention, among the waves of noise coming in, among the bodies of the men and animals all around him, among the fears and anxieties, hidden behind postures of practiced nonchalance. Perhaps the matador himself secretly wishes his cigarette would last forever. And it will—in a way.
As I’ve been thinking and writing about Before the Bullfight, I’ve gone back to see it many times. And during my most recent visit, I struggled to focus. The more I thought about this painting, the more it seemed to center around the matador’s focus, his. But my own concentration felt weak and dispersed; every sound in the museum pulled me away. I felt tired, though I’d only just arrived. On previous visits I’d sat in a chair beneath the painting, but the museum had since moved it to another room. So after standing for a while and struggling, I went into that other room and sat down. There, I took out my notebook, and tried to describe my distracted state. Here’s part of what I wrote:
…When I sit back in this black leather chair, in this room walled with display cases, full of ornate silver plates and bowls, under strong light against a purple background, and close my eyes, I hear the sound of voices echoing thin and hard throughout the tall ceilings and long hallways of the museum, laughing abruptly, calling after each other, encouraging one another in over-eager tones, tones poised tensely between guarded irony and transparent need, voices rising and ringing in shrill cascades, voices explaining rehearsed points of interest in unhesitating, didactic, almost reprimanding tones, voices chirping incomprehensible instructions over security guard radios. The echoing museum, full of these voices, is like an unbearably white page on an open laptop screen with its brightness up, filled with fine point text, from one end to another, from top to bottom, without margin, without paragraph breaks, with punctuation so small you cannot be sure if the periods and commas are on the page, or something on the screen, or actually floating on the surface of your own open eye as you try to scan the lines…
Rereading this paragraph, it seemed like the premonition of an oncoming migraine. I was especially curious and unsettled by the final image: of a laptop screen, glaring and packed to illegibility. In that image the oppressive description of sound spread into a visual metaphor. The struggle to hear became a struggle to read—culminating in a confusion between outside and in. Between the voices in the hall and the voice in one’s own head. Between the surface of the screen and the surface of the eye. In both images, the external world threatened to invade and overwhelm the internal self. One’s voice was lost in the clamor; one’s thoughts in the crowd of overlapping text. I packed up my things and went home.
Much later, I began to draw a connection between this overwhelming moment and the painting I’d been trying to study. I began to see that paragraph as more than an attempt to put my own confused frame of mind into words. I started to recognize this catalog of intrusive voices as related to the world of the painting. Eventually it seemed to me that I had struggled to focus on Before the Bullfight in much the same way that the matador struggles to focus on his cigarette. That my moment mirrored his. That the sound throughout the museum echoed the noise of the crowd at the end of the matador’s tunnel, perhaps even the commotion of the world gathered outside Botticelli’s manger.
And that these voices belonged not only to the museum visitors, but to the residents too, to the artworks themselves. It was as if the voices from the atrium were joined by a chorus of portraits throughout the hall, all of it resonating and amplified within the nearby silver bowl. Every work in the museum wanted to be heard, each made its appeal. Each insisted in is own way that what it had to say was important. And that crowd of personal visions, each with its own legitimate principles and priorities, standing on pedestals and hanging from walls, somehow threatened the very assumption of personal significance.
And this clarified for me what exactly I found in Sorolla’s enormous painting: an image of the struggle to focus. A struggle to escape the scale at which all these voices operate, and find instead someplace quiet and contained. Like the four boundaries of a framed canvas. A place where untroubled attention could be paid to one particular voice. A haven, however brief and marginal, in which to retreat and listen. A moment or an object in which to seek out what the Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset describes as:
…that tranquility which permits one to choose the truth, to abstract oneself in meditation. Almost all the world is in tumult, is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most essential attribute: the possibility of meditating, or withdrawing into himself in order to come to terms with himself and define what it is that he believes, what he truly esteems and what he truly detests.
Andrew Grum Carr is an artist, writer, and teacher from St. Paul MN. He writes short fiction and works in watercolor. He loves cinema, the library, and Saturday night jazz. You can find his artwork at www.andrewgrumcarr.com or follow him on Instagram @andrewgrumcarr.
header image: Joaquin Sorolla, Before the Bullfight (detail).
