Brilliant Spanish paintings in New York: A sign of things to come in Seattle?

NEW YORK — There's nothing like a little art heist to spice up the opening of a major art show.

A prized 18th-century oil painting by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya was stolen in November en route from Ohio to New York. "Children with a Cart," we're told, was "under the care of professional art handlers" — yet apparently those skilled professionals went off somewhere and left the Goya sitting unguarded in a truck, where it was nabbed. (Do art handlers routinely abandon irreplaceable canvases on their watch? Sounds fishy to me.) Questions from reporters and critics who gathered to preview "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History" at the Guggenheim Museum were referred to the FBI.

Fortunately, "Children with a Cart" was recovered later in November. It is now being held as evidence, an FBI spokesman said.

It's fortunate, too, that the drama of the theft was a blip on the screen compared to the thrill of the exhibition. And if what Spain's honorary vice consul in Seattle tells me is true, the Guggenheim show may be a taste of what's to come in Seattle. Luis Fernando Esteban says Spanish officials are working with Seattle Art Museum to organize a similar exhibition "of this level" that's "custom-made for the area" in 2009.

I hope that's no exaggeration, because "Spanish Painting" is a superb lineup — from images as familiar as Goya's imperious "The Duchess of Alba" and Picasso's "Woman Ironing," to lesser-known triumphs like Juan Sánchez Cotán's odd, theatrical still lifes of vegetables and fruits. His 1604 "Still Life with Cardoon and Parsnips," with its stark perspective and harsh simplicity, suggests mortifying the flesh rather than nourishing it.

Throughout the centuries that "Spanish Painting" spans, the Catholic church makes its presence felt. The Inquisition isn't mentioned, but it doesn't have to be: You feel its breath on the back of your neck. The rich reds and blacks of the Spanish palette signal passion, conflict, blood, abstinence and death, whether in the dark faces of Francisco de Zurbarán's cowled monks, the flash of toreadors in the bullring, the contorted faces of weeping women, bloody crucifixions or hunks of raw meat. The mood is gripping and seldom light-hearted.

The brilliance of the paintings is matched by their presentation. "Spanish Painting" is hands down one of the most effective installations of a museum exhibit I have seen. Part of its success is due to the quirky spiral format of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum. It allowed exhibition co-curators Carmen Giménez, of the Guggenheim, and Francisco Calvo Serraller, a former director of the Museo del Prado, to place the paintings in small, sensitive groupings. Each delivers a little epiphany about the way Spanish artists devoured each other's work. It's an almost Darwinian lesson in the evolution of painting.

The juxtapositions of Picasso and Juan Gris, so similar in style and palette during the early throes of Cubism, are predictable fare. But the shock of Picasso's slash-and-burn takeoffs (more than a century later) on Goya's still life of a butchered sheep come out of the blue. What a coup to gather the Goya "Still Life with Sheep's Head," from the Louvre, Picasso's "Still Life with Sheep's Skull" from a private collection and Picasso's "Three Skulls of Sheep" from the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid and hang them together, in all their brutal splendor. Taking the lesson a step further, you can look at Miro's 20th-century abstraction "The Red Spot" next to Goya's devastating little oil "Cannibals Preparing Their Victims," to get a visceral sense of why abstract art developed and how it conveys the essence rather than the details of a thing.

The small groupings are excellent, and most not as harrowing as the ones just detailed. But what a painting wants most is to have a viewer's full attention, one-on-one. And here each picture has plenty of elbow room. A number of larger ones even got their own walls. (What a relief from the smorgasbord presentation in so many museum shows!) And speaking of walls: They are uniformly white, unusual for this type of exhibition — and it works.

White walls became a 20th-century standard for presenting modern art and yet old masters like Velázquez, El Greco and Goya are generally shown on colors that give a flavor of the courtly or aristocratic settings they were painted for. Which is good, I think. Yet at the Guggenheim, in a show where images connect across centuries and all the work feels so immediate, treating the paintings as timeless and equal feels just right.

The labels were deftly managed, too, with artist and title information placed close enough for easy reference, but not right next to each picture. What the labels leave out is bulky explanations. Rather, concise textual summaries hang at resting points before each section of the show. That way, the paintings are doled out as thoughtfully as the courses of a sumptuous banquet, the reading material interspersed as a way to cleanse your palette and prepare for what comes next.

And what comes next, after each junction of the 15 thematic sections of the show, are more drop-dead paintings.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com