The Prado launches a new exhibition format dedicated to a single work with ‘The Year of Hunger in Madrid’ by José Aparicio

The National Prado Museum has inaugurated its new exhibition format in which a single work is given prominence in an exhibition that revolves around it. The first of this project is ‘The Year of Hunger in Madrid’, painted in 1818 by José Aparicio.

The objective of the program, according to the museum’s director, Miguel Falomir, is “to invite the viewer to contemplate a work that, beyond its aesthetic merits, allows us to reflect on aspects of art history that often go unnoticed“.

The painting, now unknown to the public, was one of the most acclaimed in the museum, where it came to “eclipse” figures such as Francisco de Goya and José de Madrazo during the reign of Ferdinand VII, as explained by the director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, during the presentation of the exhibition this Monday.

“It illustrates the fame and swings of fortune when going from the top of the Prado to ostracism, to being literally expelled from the museum.eo”, Falomir stated, while pointing out that Aparicio’s work was “the first one he thought of” for the new format.

The large canvas – 315 by 437 centimeters – represents a group of starving figures rejecting the bread offered by French soldiers during the famine that devastated Madrid in 1811 and 1812, and was presented at the opening of the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture in 1819 as an allegory of the “Spanish constancy” and the unconditional fidelity to the absolutism of Fernando VII, as explained by one of the curators of the exhibition, Carlos G. Navarro.

The reconstruction of its original location in the museum, carried out in collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid, has also made it possible to investigate the founding episode of the institution and reveal the ideological toll that He imposed the absolutism of Ferdinand VII in that space, which at that time was his property, as the art gallery has highlighted.

HE WENT THROUGH THE MINISTRY OF DEVELOPMENT AND THE SENATE

Starting in 1872, the annexation of the Trinidad Museum to the newly nationalized Museum of Painting and Sculpture forced the collections to be reorganized and decide which works remained in the Villanueva building. Aparicio’s work was considered incompatible with the liberal discourse after the Revolution of 1868, he was one of those that had to go through that process.

The painting was hung in the Ministry of Public Works in 1874 and Goya then began to have more works in the Prado Museum, reaching thirteen. The curator of the exhibition, Celia Guilarte, explained that at that time the press continued to defend the ‘hunger painting’ and argued that its departure was only understood for political reasons. “This was not like that. So, Goya was tradition and Aparicio, modernity.“Guilarte has clarified.

In 1881 the work moved to the corridors of the Senate and in 1888 to the National Museum of Modern Art, where it was practically forgotten. In this sense, the exhibition highlights precisely this reversal of roles between Aparicio and Goya. If the former opted for academic rhetoric and static heroism to praise a regime, Goya captured the “stark and universal” violence, according to the Prado. A political genealogy that, as the Prado points out, continues in works such as Antonio Gisbert’s ‘Execution of Torrijos’ and culminates a century later in Picasso’s ‘Guernica’..

After passing through the Senate and the Museum of Modern Art, the work arrived at the Madrid History Museum in 1927, where it remains in storage at the Prado until today. Its temporary return to the Villanueva building has been accompanied by a restoration that has improved the stability and legibility of the canvas.

The exhibition can be visited from this Monday until September 13 in room 66 of the Villanueva building and is accompanied by a series of conferences on May 13, 16, 20 and 23, as well as a colloquium on art and media criticism on May 7, moderated by the journalist Rubén Amón and with the participation of Inés Martín Rodrigo, Daniel Gascón and Jesús García Calero.