José Gutiérrez Solana The Mask Maker
El constructor de máscaras, 1944.
Oil on canvas. 138 x 113 cm
Speak Moses!
(Based on Solana’s The Mask Maker)
The most notable feature of this painting, in my opinion, is Emeterio’s resemblance to the masks he makes. That is the real challenge, Solana would say. There is no Spanish painter throughout the entire twentieth century, except Picasso, with a personality as pronounced as his. What is more, there are hardly any of Picasso’s three-eyed women on the streets anymore, yet nowadays we still find the types that Solana painted anytime, anywhere, chatting with the bishop or as ladies of the evening on Calle Desengaño.
Emeterio was a friend of Solana’s. His atelier was in the Plaza de Gabriel Miró, also known as Las Vistillas, and Solana would go there to watch him work. He admired his friend’s inventiveness. Sometimes he would suggest innovations, and Emeterio, who only used yellow, red and blue, in addition to white, would do them. We do not know whether this likeable old geezer was still alive in the 1940s, because the war closed in on Madrid, amidst secret police, bombs and hunger, sweeping many people away with it and considerably thinning out the scene. I know that the painting is from 1944, but Solana also painted many dead people. If he was still alive, it was most likely Emeterio who made the masks that appear in Carnival Sunday, which Solana drew on Neville’s request. It is impressive to see that great film; it is Solana’s world in motion, the old streets of Madrid, the Rastro flea market, the dislocated types, women wearing grotesque masks, carnivals…
Nietzsche said that everything deep loves a mask, and this is why Solana liked painting them so much, because he was a painter who peered inside. Sánchez-Camargo says that Solana was bothered that Picasso plagiarised his horse in ‘Bullring in Ronda’ and ‘Bullring in Turégano’, I don’t remember which one, one of the two, years after seeing them in Paris in 1928: he limited himself to saying ‘that’s just not right’. He got his vengeance in The Mask Maker, making them cubist, Picassian. Except they are still alive. For example, the one that Emeterio is holding in this painting. He seems to be waiting for his creator to finally finish, to hear what Michelangelo said: Speak, Moses! Everything in Solana speaks, everything is worth pondering, everything peers inside.
Andrés Trapiello, writer and expert on Solana’s work.
