From Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe to Hadrian and Antinous: the ‘Creative Passions’ of two gleaners of art history | Culture

Busts of Hadrian and his favourite member of his entourage, Antinous, are displayed in room 74 of the Prado Museum in Madrid. The emperor’s will is still being fulfilled 19 centuries after their deaths. When his young lover died in the waters of the Nile River, the Caesar decided to deify him, building temples in his honour and perpetuating his image on effigies and coins. He turned him into a goddess. in a great god of Greek paganism despite being the only one who rendered him authentic worship.

The love story between Bernardo Pajares and Juanra Sanz, two workers at the Madrid museum, was born surrounded by the thousands of works housed in the building, including the two that remember Hadrian and Antinous. Their union and their common passion gave rise to the podcast Compact arta corner that applies new perspectives to the History of Art. This audio log combines their intimacy as a couple with a travel diary and the history behind the great works of painting, sculpture or photography. Their first joint book, Creative Passions (Aguilar)maintains that essence and addresses 10 episodes of love, passion and desire that have given meaning to great works. “We react to art as everyone does, from what appeals to you, from your memories and experiences,” the couple commented at the Prado Museum. The text focuses on an aspect that irremediably attracts them: intimacies, in any of their forms, that give rise to the creation of an artistic piece.

In its pages, the authors question the creativity that blossomed when love arose between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe or Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. These are two of the healthiest and most fruitful relationships that appear in the text, while in others, such as that of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar or that of Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine Nivison, these romantic encounters were a great detriment to them.

The intention of the authors of Creative Passions It is not about cancelling established names. “We are not capable of destroying the artistic canon and rewriting it, although perhaps we can try to enrich it, recovering the stories that surrounded its great heroes and the official stories,” Sanz confesses. “In the different spaces in which we have been able to analyse the history of art, we have tried to glean, as Agnès Varda would say, very specific cultural projects, recovering those things that others left behind. Now that there are so many windows of information, I have the hope that the new generations, when they discover Dora Maar, will do so as a photographer and not as one of Picasso’s partners,” her husband adds.

The book also recalls Francis Bacon’s self-destruction through his male lovers. And the tragedy of photographers Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, 20 years younger than his partner and mentor. Both were victims of the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, and starred in one of the chapters of his book. podcast which was the hardest to record and that is precisely why they decided to recover it as the final chapter of Creative PassionsWhen Peter fell ill, David was with him even though he was no longer his partner. And he photographed him so that he would be immortal.

The conversational format of their sound space becomes in this text a kind of epistolary literature, in which one of them breaks down the artistic consequences of these different emotional connections throughout history and the other interacts face to face with this micro-essay. “One of them delivered his text and the other reacted almost immediately to what was read, to record a response as fresh and spontaneous as possible,” explains Pajares. “As in the podcastWe talk about things from our lives and also historical data that you have to be very well informed about. By transferring it to black and white, I have felt a vertigo that I had not felt before in this way,” admits Sanz. “Alejandro Vergara Sharp, curator of the Prado, recently explained that, when leaving something in writing, he feels much more obliged to make it true, although it is also true when you record it in front of a microphone or a camera,” he continues.

Creative Passions The Prado was born around the concept of love, but its authors decided to derive it to the concept of passion “so as not to call some of the toxic relationships that appear in the book love,” says Sanz. “And because darkness is just as powerful when it comes to inspiring art,” he argues. And the fact is that love is not a primary theme in the painting that can be seen in the Prado, as “it is more focused on official art, commissioned by the church and power,” the couple points out, and in which religious matters and warlike exploits predominate. But, although it has not been a subject so actively explored until recently, “a simple portrait can hide a lot of love, like the one Anna Klumpke made of Rosa Bonheur,” recalls Pajares. Perhaps the relationship between the two painters gives rise to a second volume of these creative passions.