On the Reverse

In Las Meninas Velázquez looks out at us from behind a large canvas of which we can only see the reverse and which occupies a considerable proportion of the pictorial surface. Through this canvas nailed to a wooden stretcher the painter refers to the image as artifice, opening a door for us onto a secret dimension.

This exhibition goes beyond the simple action of turning paintings around. Rather, the Museo del Prado is undertaking a complete reassessment of the backs of works in its collections while also identifying relevant examples in other major museums which reveal how appreciation of works of art is enhanced when we do more than just look at the front. The exhibition addresses issues that have never previously been brought together and in which there is also space for imaginative interpretations: the emergence of the reverse as a pictorial motif in two sub-genres: the self-portrait of the artist behind the canvas and the depiction of the picture back in trompe l’oeil; the poetic reading of the stretcher as a cross; two-sided paintings; the back as a field for experimentation and subjective expression; aesthetic appreciation of the material nature of the works, and the issue of the viewer seen from behind, which makes us aware of the particular spatial relationships that are generated by human interaction with art.

By turning works around to pervert their conventional frontality and by obliging us to walk round them and take on a more active role as viewers, we introduce contemporary creative attitudes and contemplative experiences into the museum which celebrate the side of the painting on which the light never falls.

Areas of the exhibition

1. The artist behind the canvas
2. The stretcher as a cross
3. This is not a reverse
4. B-Sides
5. The hidden side
6. More information on the back: inscriptions
7. More information on the back: stamps and seals
8. Folds, cuts and cutouts
9. From behind, in front of the painting
10. Ornaments and ghosts
11. Nature in the background

Behind the canvas

The central decades of the 17th century saw the consolidation of a type of self-portrait that still survives today: the painter seen in his studio behind a painting on which he is working and of which we only see the back. Opening the exhibition, Vik Muniz’s faithful reproduction of the reverse of Las Meninas encourages us to make a physical and conceptual turn while establishing a connection with the unprecedented sculptural presence of the reverse of the canvas on an easel in the paintings by Rembrandt and Barent Fabritius. Those images also include items habitually found in an artist’s studio such as a mahlstick, a palette hanging from a nail and canvases turned to the wall, the latter the subject of particular attention here.

Although an eloquent element, the picture back can also remain on the margins: Francisco de Goya, Vincent van Gogh, Ignacio Pinazo and José Villegas located themselves next to it in simple half-length formats. Inspired by Las Meninas, Max Liebermann proposed more complex spatial games. On its own, however, and resting on an easel, the canvas seen from behind can even stand in for the image of the artist—so much is it associated with it—as an alter ego. This is the case with works on display here by Carl Gustav Carus, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The stretcher as a cross

Stretchers are one of the essential components of picture backs, both real and represented. For small-format works they are rectangular and reinforced at the corners, while larger ones require a cross-bar for extra strength. In that case the cross supports the pictorial image in a figurative sense. The canvas is fixed to the stretcher with nails, crucified, while in order to carry paintings we hold them by the stretcher, bearing the cross. François Bunel the Younger, Georgia O’Keeffe and Mark Rothko perform this type of secular and artistic Via crucis, sharing the penitential status of the anonymous French painting The Christian Soul accepts its Cross. The accumulation of wooden crosses in that work is repeated in David Douglas Duncan’s photograph of Picasso’s studio, from whose Guernica—a sacrificial scene—the Prado is exhibiting part of the original stretcher, possibly the most well-worn in history: a veritable Ecce Homo.

As the photographs of the protection and safeguarding of works of art in the collections of the Louvre and the Prado reveal, wars and conflicts lead to the movement and turning round of paintings, revealing their cross-bearing souls. This was also emphasised by Antoni Tàpies, who often perverted the concept and use of stretchers and crosses, and by Joan Miró, whose “burnt canvases” exposed the painting’s hidden structure.

This is not a reverse

Another 17th-century innovation was the depiction of the reverse of a work in trompe l’oeil, no longer as the attribute of the painter but now the key motif in the composition. This typology was soon adopted by Francisco Gallardo with his metaartistic deceptions within the sub-genre of the “corner of the studio”, showing parts of the backs of prints or canvases pinned or nailed to wooden boards through their lifted edges or tears. The latter device was also employed by Louis-Léopold Boilly, who introduced a humorous and irreverent tone into a serious exercise of fiction through the hungry cat and the log of wood that has pierced the fictive canvas. Equally surprising is the fact that when André-Jacques-Victor Orsel drew the preparatory cartoon for his most successful painting he took the trouble to depict the stretcher to which the intended pieces of canvas would be affixed, detailing the veins of the wood and the nails, perhaps as part of the planning stage prior to the execution of the work.

The title of this section pays homage to René Magritte, an essential presence here. Words replace images in an enigmatic work that can be interpreted as a picture back (on an irregularly shaped stretcher) resting on the ground, as in so many images of artists’ studios.

B-Sides

The paragone or Renaissance debate on the relative merits of painting and sculpture inspired the production of two-sided paintings with one or more figures depicted from the front and back. Late echoes of that formula are found in Martin van Meytens the Younger’s licentious work, but also in the life studies associated with the teaching of anatomy by Juan Bernabé Palomino and José López Enguídanos, the latter “synthesising” that dual viewpoint into a single image.

A considerable number of the earliest two-sided works were portable devotional panels or part of folding diptychs. Notably successful was a type of portrait with a reverse that “characterised” the sitter through figures or religious or symbolic scenes, illustrated here with examples by Wolfgang Beurer, an anonymous Venetian artist and the Master of the Magdalen Legend. With regard to two-sided devotional images, examples by Adriaen Isenbrandt, the Master of the Legend of Saint Catherine, an anonymous, possibly Spanish artist and a Mexican enconchado workshop reveal how depictions employing different codes (conventional pictorial figuration and fictive sculpture), languages (narrative and icon) and genres (religious or historical and landscape) could go “back to back”, establishing sometimes enigmatic relationships between the two sides.

The hidden side

Many images that remained hidden on the backs of works as they were part of the creative process and thus lacked relevance for the interpretation of the front nonetheless provide information on the artist’s methods and personality. In some cases these are finished or almost completed compositions which were abandoned for one reason or another, after which the artist used the other side of the canvas. By chance, the four examples selected here—by Gregorio Fosman and an unknown artist, Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Darío de Regoyos—have one element in common: of rectangular format, the orientation of the principal image is different to the secondary one, and with the exception of the work by Kirchner the two sides correspond to a different pictorial genre.

Another group of works exemplifies the use of the reverse to try out ideas or add annotations of different types. In two of them—by an anonymous Italian artist and Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes—the front image is also present on the back in the form of a drawing, possibly to test the composition. Normally, however, the front and back images are different and even dissonant: Annibale Carracci concealed a veritable palimpsest of caricatural drawings behind his painting; Vicente Palmaroli located landscape and figure studies on the two sides; and Juan Antonio Benlliure reused a canvas with a preliminary study of a ferociously painted-out female body on the back in order to paint his self-portrait on the front.

More information on the back: inscriptions

This section has involved a radical exercise: turning most of the pictures to face the wall. The result has been to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the unpremeditated compositions created by the frames, stretchers, labels, handwriting, etc., and the frustration provoked in the viewer by the concealment of the image, anticipated in Las Meninas.

The most “pictorial” inscriptions comment on the images on the front, as with The Holy Family by Bernard van Orley, with Titian and with an anonymous 17th-century copyist, whose work, like Van Orley’s Virgin of Louvain, reveals the importance of preserving the written part in some cases, for example when a copy was made or restoration undertaken. The latter included relining the canvases and on occasions the annotations made by the person who undertook that task have helped to trace the work’s provenance, as with Orazio Gentileschi’s painting.

We also encounter simple testaments to friendship between Anton Raphael Mengs and Nicolás de Azara or Alejandro Ferrant and Francisco Pradilla, or more extensive biographical information on artists, models and benefactors present on the works by Vicente López, Francisco Javier de Urrutia and Ricardo Balaca. Finally, Eugenio Lucas Velázquez’s mordant comments reveal that he did more than simply imitate Goya’s pictorial style.

More information on the back: stamps and seals

Almost all the backs of works in this exhibition feature stamps and seals and this section aims to draw particular attention to them. Even a work as small as Fra Angelico’s bears inscriptions, sealing wax seals of the Alba family, various inventory labels and the Civil War requisition stamp. The latter is also present on the anonymous portrait of Alonso Cano, which also has labels of old exhibitions that allow the history of the work’s attribution to be traced.

The most ambitious collectors marked their possessions and we see stamps or initials of Isabella Farnese on the copy of the work by Bernardino Luini; of the Prince of Asturias (the future Charles IV) on the work by Francisco Bayeu (with indications of the work’s travels); and of Gaspar de Haro on the painting by El Greco, which also retains signs of its progress through the art market. The labels that testify to the most dramatic histories are, however, those on the back of Salomon Koninck’s painting—a press cutting of an obituary and indications of the work’s presence in the famous Stafford Gallery in London and its subsequent ownership by a Jewish art dealer whose collection was seized by the Nazis—and those which reveal the fire damage to Andries van Eertvelt’s seascape when in the home of a Francoist government minister.

Folds, cuts and cutouts

Cuts and folds concealed on the backs of paintings provide evidence of conservation work or of the adaptation of paintings to new locations. The wooden planks of panels that have separated are “sewn” together, as we see with Andrea del Sarto’s, using crossbeams and dovetail joints that now create unforeseen compositions. The same is true—and is emphasised by the visual resonance of Pablo Palazuelo’s painting—of the cut-off pieces retained on the backs of Francesco Albani’s frescoes for the pendentives in the Roman church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli. Fragments from the rectangular canvases to which the compositions were transferred after removal from the wall, they are the result of the reinstatement of the works’ original oval format.

Turning around a tapestry cartoon by Zacarías González Velázquez reveals a strip of painting that was folded over the stretcher at some date in order to fit the work into a narrower space. The opposite was the case with another design for a tapestry, this time by Rubens, when an addition on all sides in the form of a cradle painted with architectural motifs was recently removed and now frames the absence of the image. With regard to monochrome, another absence of representation, Lucio Fontana slashed his painting to open up a crack onto the tenebrous space behind it.

From behind, in front of the painting

When viewers (or artists) locate themselves in front of a painting they forget the surrounding reality or turn their backs on it to display their own. This was the case in artists’ studios from an early date, as recorded by Wallerant Vaillant when he spied on a young apprentice copying a painting, or Manuel Fernández Carpio, who observed art dealers participating in an estate sale in the studio of an 18th-century painter. The protagonist of this section is, however, the public, now transformed into an artistic subject in itself; seen not from the front but looking into the pictorial space, immersed in the contemplation of works.

The Mondo nuovo or portable peepshow allowed Giandomenico Tiepolo to convey the faceless, modern urban crowd’s desire for spectacle. Nor do we see that of the visitor to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum who, at Sophie Calle’s request, located herself in front of the frame of one of the paintings stolen from that museum in order to describe what she saw in the empty space. Similarly invisible are the faces of visitors to Versailles and to the Prado itself, which Elliott Erwitt photographed in a humorous tone, revealing the spatial dynamics and poses that we typically adopt in museums.

Ornaments and ghosts

Some backs have significant decoration on them. One type imitates other materials, as in Quinten Massys’ panel with its beautiful fictive marbling and the one by Alejo Fernández with a more unusual simulation of an animal skin. Others complement the image on the front, such as the tabernacle door by Juan de Juanes on which the Christogram that now faces the wall was originally the side always visible to the faithful.

The canvas itself could possess aesthetic qualities. One example is the “mantelillo veneciano” with figural motifs used by Eugenio Cajés or, in a geometrical mode, the ticking employed as a support by José María Estrada. Depending on the materials and the state of conservation, thinner fabrics make beautiful ghosts appear. Oils in particular penetrate the canvas via the ground and create the soft-edged forms that we see on the backs. The most striking case of ghostliness is the work attributed to Orazio Borgianni, closely followed by Vicente Palmaroli’s. Backs of sculptures can also be spectral: inside Charles V’s armour cast by Leone Leoni a dripping, igneous body takes shape.

Nature in the background

The backs of works reveal the museum’s ecosystem—wood, vegetable fibres, iron, oils, resins, bio-deterioration wherever we look—but also unusual materials (all from the natural world) which painters often used to increase their interaction with the image. Examples include the glass or stone supports employed by Ciro Ferri (aventurine), Agnolo Bronzino (red porphyry) and Francesco Pieri (slate), which are left visible on the back and function as the backgrounds of the paintings or of the latter’s wax reliefs.

Again, the most transparent supports add light to Karl August Müller’s miniatures on porcelain and Francisca Ifigenia Meléndez and Heinrich Friedrich Füger’s on ivory, the latter two embellished with human hair. Another biological material, one of the rarest in the museum, is cork, used as a support by Alonso Sánchez Coello. One of the most common is copper, as in the small plates which Jan van Kessel painted on the front and also in some cases with preliminary sketches on the back, on which oxidisation also charts a spectral geography. Spectral is also an appropriate term for José María Sicilia’s specular “door”, a homage to Goya that concludes this survey, which started with another opening in space: the back of Las Meninas.

Miguel Ángel Blanco adds his own signature as an artist to the exhibition with three works that transmute the element found in greatest abundance on the backs of paintings: dust. When the Museo del Prado took down its extremely large copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration Miguel Ángel collected some of the dust accumulated on the cross-beams of its stretcher during decades of darkness with the aim—and echoing the painting’s subject—of transforming it into light.