Drama adds a bit of excitement to Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, NYC). Like a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’s painting Children with a Cart (1778) was hijacked last November when it was en route to the art museum. The FBI stepped in to investigate, and the painting was safely returned to the Guggenheim on February 21. From now until March 28, you can stand before this and 134 other diverse paintings from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. General admission to the museum is $18, though every Friday from 5:45 – 7:15 PM you can pay what you wish. All visitors receive complimentary audio tours, and there are free tours by docents daily at noon and 2:00.

Beyond the stolen Goya painting, Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso raises some eyebrows for breaking from traditional art history constraints of what constitutes Spanish painting. The Guggenheim explains:

Until recently art historians bracketed Spanish painting between El Greco and Goya, maintaining that 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Surrealism—both of which were pioneered by artists of Spanish origin—broke completely with the traditions that preceded them. Today we have sufficient historical perspective to see that, despite their revolutionary aesthetic leaps, the great artists of the early twentieth century were nourished by traditional models that were, furthermore, local in character.

Therefore, the exhibit features everyone from Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo to Juan Gris, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró. As if that weren’t enough to stir up a little controversy in the art world, the museum pushes boundaries even further by forgoing a chronological layout. Guggenheim says:

Unlike other overviews that display paintings in a strictly chronological order, this exhibition is broken into fifteen distinct sections, each based on a theme running through the past five centuries of Spanish culture. These thematic axes highlight affinities between the art of the old masters and that of the modern era, and challenge conventional art histories that would seek to separate them. Accordingly, works from different periods appear side by side within each section, offering often radical juxtapositions that cut across time to reveal the overwhelming coherence of the Spanish tradition.

Thus we see Goya’s Still Life with Dead Hares, a realistic piece painted ca. 1808-12, next to Miró’s The Table (Still Life with Rabbit), an abstract work painted over a century later in 1921. We see Velázquez’s The Needlewoman, a naturalistic portraiture from ca. 1640-50, next to Picasso’s Woman Ironing, a cubist work from 1904. Scandalous!

By throwing time to the wind, the exhibit cleverly pinpoints the common motifs in Spanish paining throughout history, showing that there are certain Truths that persevere. Hence, the exhibit’s subtitle Time, Truth, and History. Not suprisingly, Time, Truth, and History is the title to one of the Goya paintings, and as mentioned above, Goya is the traditional end cap for Spanish painting.

The exhibit lauds these time-honored subject matters to be bodegones, landscapes of fire, virgins and mothers, nudes, children, monstruos, knights and ghosts, ladies, crucifixions, the fallen, and flyers, among others. By breaking the exhibit up into themes, the museum shows how earlier artists influenced later artists. A prime example of this is, Picasso’s The Infanta Margarita María from The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas), after Velázquez (1957), positioned next to Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Queen Mariana (ca. 1656). More importantly, the exhibit argues that while certain artistic styles become in vogue, the painters ultimately respond to the same aspects of culture, much of which concerns everyday life and religion.