- Artist:
- Pilar Montaner de Sureda
- Date:
- ca. 1910
- Technique:
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 152 x 204 cm
- Origin:
- Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, CaixaBank collection long-term loan
- Registration number:
- 385
Apparently, the painting narrates an everyday scene from Mallorcan life where two girls sitting at the door of a traditional home in the foreground, both with the same posture, are watched over by an elderly woman who remains in the shadow in the background. In itself, the composition contains a strange mystery measured by attitudes, gazes and gestures in the ellipsis of the narration and its premonitory signs (the hortensias, the black cat). They also reveal issues of status, dominion and power in a society in which women were obliged to adopt conformist, passive attitudes. The work has been subject to new interpretations thanks to the Carte Blanche of the Es Baluard Collection such as those made by Agustín Fernández Mallo, Comic Nostrum or Isaki Lacuesta.
N.A.
Pilar Montaner y Sureda was an impressionist painter from the early 20th century, a pupil of Joaquin Sorolla, among others. The mother of eleven children and the wife of Joan Sureda, the heir of the Palacio Rei Sanxo in Valldemossa, she lived amidst luxury and children, art and culture. Different intellectuals of the day passed through the Suredas’ palace, like Unamuno and Rubén Darío. In this context of cultural activity, Pilar Montaner was one of the few Mallorcan women of the age who were able to devote themselves to painting and her work was exhibited in the main galleries of Barcelona and Madrid. The themes of the countryside, including her olive trees, portraits and scenes from everyday local life, reveal a talent that could have been developed more intensely. A painter who was unfairly forgotten by the great History, her work was barely recognised within a very active artistic context.
N.A.
