As if it were a transfer from the summer soccer market, the Museo Nacional del Prado has confirmed on Tuesday the purchase of the work ‘El satíro’ by the Valencian painter Antonio Fillol for an amount of 110,000 euros, after the approval of the Royal Board of the Prado National Museum. In this way, the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, where it was exhibited, loses one of its most iconic paintings.
The purchase, as indicated by the art gallery in a statement, was made last June. His exhibition is planned in the temporary exhibition that the Prado will carry out from the end of May 2024 on Social Art and which is expected to include five works by Antonio Fillol.
The acquisition of the work is due to the fact that “so stark” manifestations are not “frequent” in Spanish painting of the early twentieth century. “There are not frequent such stark manifestations of a problem on which art had decided to close its eyes for the most part,” said the deputy director of Conservation and Research at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Andrés Úbeda.
In 1906 Antonio Fillol tackled a matter that was unacceptable to the jury of that year’s National Exhibition, from which he was expelled along with other authors. The painting shows the lineup in which the abuser of a girl appears
“It is about a painting created to be exhibited, valued and, where appropriate, awarded, in the National Exhibition of 1906, in which its author clearly indicated victims, executioners and bored officials, to whom not even the torn treatment of Fillol manages to move. The result of his complaint was the expulsion from the Madrid contest and the exhibition of the painting in an alternative setting, as was the Valencian Center in Madrid”, explained Úbeda.
The work acquired by the Prado will allow its inclusion in the painting rooms of the 19th and 20th centuries, where it will be accompanied by paintings that share the same critical sensibility of a social or political nature and be confronted with others of a more accommodating tone with social conventions.
In this way, the statement argues, ‘El sátyro’ can be understood in its historical context and compared with others by the artist himself that the museum already has. Previously, as the Museum points out, the work will require a light restoration treatment of both the pictorial surface and the frame.
The work was part of the exhibition ‘Guests. Fragments on women ideology and plastic arts in Spain (1833-1931)’, organized by the Museum in 2020.
