Art as a witness of the transformations

With the end of the last Carlist war, in 1876, and the immediate suppression of the tariff rules that limited the free trade of iron, a rapid take-off of Basque industry, in a modern sense, began.

Art was no stranger to this phenomenon. During the period between approximately 1876 and 1936, the true golden age of Basque mining and iron and steel industry, there was the perfect breeding ground for a large group of artists to coincide in space and time to capture, through their art, the depth of these changes. It is the beginning of modernity also for Basque art.

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Art, a reflection of the changes

The interest in collecting and the arts of the new emerging social class, the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie, explains to a great extent the birth of this artistic focus. Their patronage conditioned that a good part of the works created in these years were destined either to portray the members of this dominant elite or to reflect their tastes and lifestyles.

However, the sensitivity of the artists also knew how to tune in to other realities that were developing in parallel. Painting, in particular, knew how to reflect the effect of these changes in a realistic manner, even delving into social criticism.

As was the case in other European countries, Basque art explored themes that had never been dealt with before, such as factory work, social marginalization and the exploitation of women, among others.

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Industrial landscapes

The first great visible impact of the emerging process was suffered by the landscape and, in our geographical area, the Bilbao Estuary was the most extreme example of landscape transformation. The list of paintings in which the estuary and its industries have been represented would be endless and for this reason we are only going to stop in three works of three great artists of that unrepeatable generation.

Anselmo Guinea (1854-1906), stood out for reflecting, with his unquestionable mastery, although still devoid of social criticism, the harshness of the work along the estuary. In his well-known painting La Sirga de frente (1893), the artist depicted a man and a woman, painfully pulling a rope that drags a barge sliding along an estuary full of steamboats.

Another of the great renovators of Basque art, Darío de Regoyos (1857-1913), also dedicated several canvases to the Bilbao Estuary and its industrialization. As an example, in his work Altos Hornos de Bilbao (1908), the author has represented two anonymous characters that contemplate, from the opposite bank of Lamiako, the intimidating stamp of the recently created industrial colossus, which spits smoke incessantly from its towering chimneys.

The third artist is the Bilbao-born Adolfo Guiard (1860-1916) who, in an impressionist style, also presented us with different views of the industrial estuary. A good example is his oil painting La Ría en Axpe, which depicts the bustle of the estuary at that point, with its steamships and the backdrop of factory chimneys.

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Work representation

Work in or near factories, as well as the harsh working conditions of the new working class, were also a favorite motif of artists at this time.

The imagination of Ricardo Baroja (1871-1953) recreated what it might have been like to work in the primitive, pre-industrial haizeolas de monte. In a curious triptych, the artist reflected the three phases of work in this activity: the manual extraction of the iron in the mountain, the obtaining of the coal in a coal bunker and the final fusion in the furnace, once the coal and the mineral had been loaded.

The Philippine painter Juan Luna Novicio (1857-1899) visited our lands, where he became friends with some of the great figures of the industrial development of Biscay. As a result of this relationship, several commissions came out in which he reflected the reality of work in the factories, in this case, from the perspective of the people who worked in them. In Los ferrones (1893), the artist shows the titanic struggle of two workers who, with hardly any protective measures, toil at their hard work in extremely hot conditions.

This lack of elementary safety measures caused numerous accidents at work. Many artists throughout Europe felt the need to reflect this precarious situation.

In our geographical space, Aurelio Arteta (1879-1940) left us in Accidente de trabajo en una fábrica de Vizcaya ( 1902) an excellent example of the dramatic new reality.

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The social art of Vicente Cutanda

The work of Vicente Cutanda (1850-1925), a painter from Teruel, although closely linked to Bizkaia, moves along an even more socially critical line. From a perspective of open denunciation, linked to the nascent workers' movements, the artist portrayed the crude reality of work in the steel factories. His well-known works Una huelga de obreros en Vizcaya (1892) and Preparativos del Primero de mayo (1894) allow us to evoke the atmosphere of tense confrontation that accompanied the industrialization process from the perspective of the workers' organization.

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The role of women

The need for labor for the mines and for industry also dragged women into precarious employment. Their situation, doing the lowest paid jobs or receiving lower wages for performing the same tasks, turned them into second-class workers. Prostitution was the lowest rung in this descent into marginality, an extreme that was also denounced by the artists of the time.

In the context of work linked to industry, we can again cite Darío de Regoyos. In Cargadoras en El Arenal, he shows us the work of a group of women who unload, each one with her basket, the cargo of a ship moored in front of Bilbao's Arenal.

A job worthy of draft animals, but often carried out by women, was that of the towline. When speaking of the Ría, we have quoted a work by Anselmo de Guinea on this trade; at this point we will mention another one, Mujeres a la sirga (Women at the towline). In this version, the protagonists are two women depicted by Guinea with their backs turned, with the ropes around their bodies, dragging a barge that, in the framing of the scene, is not visible to the viewer.

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The estuary, the industry and the work in the factories have generated many other works of art, whether in painting, sculpture, photography or even cinema. They have done so, moreover, up to the present day. For reasons of space, we have limited the scope of this article to a few authors and works, which we have chosen for having been direct witnesses of the golden age of the Basque steel industry.