In America with Velázquez: Triumph and Disaster
In October 1924, José Moya del Pino had stood at the center of a celebration at Madrid's Ritz Hotel. Fifty-two distinguished guests—among them members of the royal family, aristocrats, writers, and painters—had gathered to honor an extraordinary achievement: Moya's painstaking copies of all the Velázquez paintings in the Prado Museum, made at their original dimensions and with the techniques used by the seventeenth-century master. The paintings’ journey across the Atlantic had royal patronage, diplomatic support, and an ambition worthy of its name; everything seemed in place for a triumph.
On February 18, 1925, the steamship Reina María Cristina, a four-masted passenger liner, departed Cádiz for New York, carrying Moya and his extraordinary cargo. Also on board were his friend and assistant, the sculptor Francisco Moré de la Torre, and their collaborator Antonio González de la Peña. Moya traveled as director of Exhibiciones Velázquez, the enterprise established to bring the collection to audiences beyond Spain.
After years of work in the Prado, the expedition was finally under way.
A Grand Arrival
The party reached New York on March 8 and checked into the Pennsylvania Hotel, then among Manhattan's most luxurious establishments. The arrival attracted press attention, including a report in The New York Times. Alexander Moore, the United States ambassador to Spain, met the group in New York; he had been one of the project's important American supporters, helping champion its cause during Moya's time in Madrid. To underline the expedition's diplomatic as well as artistic significance, Moya had him deliver a hand-painted fan to President Calvin Coolidge, as a gift for his wife Grace.
The first exhibition opened on March 26 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, organized by the Philadelphia Forum. The response was striking. Critics praised the copies with a warmth that bordered on astonishment. One reviewer observed that the paintings were “so very like the originals that only a Velázquez expert can tell the difference.” Another described the exhibition as “an unprecedented event,” praising Moya for having reproduced not only the master's color, line, light, and mass, but also Velázquez's distinctive artistic vision and the spirit of his work.
Philadelphia, Washington, New York, San Francisco
From Philadelphia, the exhibition traveled to Washington, where it was installed at the Corcoran Gallery. The choice of venue gave the project another prestigious platform, this time in the American capital. The paintings then moved north to the Brooklyn Museum, where the exhibition remained through June 1925.
Cover of the exhibition guide. Newspaper article about the opening of the exhibition in Brooklyn, New York (masthead missing).
After these three cities, the plan was to continue south to Central and Latin American countries that had originally been Spanish colonies and were the crown had a particular interest in rekindling relations. But countries that had originally shown enthusiasm for the venture faltered, and the promised support failed to materialize. Brazil cited economic difficulties; Ecuador withdrew an earlier offer for the same reasons; and Colombia, Cuba, Uruguay, and eventually Argentina also declined to provide the necessary backing.
The Spanish ambassador in New York introduced the project to his counterpart in San Francisco, and the decision was made to bring the exhibition to California. In late July of 1925 the show opened in the brand new wing of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. It was an opportunity to reach a new audience and extend the tour at a moment when its future was becoming increasingly uncertain.
And the public response was extraordinary. During its first six weeks, half a million people visited the exhibition.* The reviews, again, were enthusiastic. By the measure that had mattered most to Moya from the beginning—the opportunity for the public to encounter Velázquez's art—the project was a remarkable success.
Yet, as the expedition made its way across the country, another reality was becoming harder to ignore. The exhibition could draw crowds and win critical acclaim, but neither guaranteed that there would be enough money to keep it traveling.
The Cost of Success
Exhibiciones Velazquez had expected to supplement its funding by sharing a portion of the ticket price charged for admission. They had not adequately accounted for the American museum system's established practice at the time of free public admission. Without ticket revenue, money started to run out, while the cost of hotels, transportation for dozens of large paintings, and the everyday expenses of keeping the expedition moving continued to add up.
The expedition had reached the Pacific coast, but there was no clear path forward. The crowds could not solve the underlying financial problem. Then came the crisis that turned a difficult undertaking into a personal catastrophe: the treasurer responsible for carrying the expedition's funds disappeared with the money.
Suddenly, the situation became desperate. There was no way to continue. Spain, meanwhile, could offer little practical assistance: the government of Miguel Primo de Rivera was facing mounting political difficulties, and King Alfonso XIII, who had enthusiastically backed the project, would soon go into exile. The political order that had made the exhibition possible was itself beginning to unravel, and Spain was heading toward a period of profound upheaval. The Spanish Embassy could not extend credit, and Alexander Moore, the US Ambassador to Spain and the project's most consistent American advocate, had been reassigned to Lima. And the anticipated Latin American leg of the journey was no longer a realistic prospect.
González de la Peña returned to Spain. Moré de la Torre tried to keep things afloat for a while, searching for other cities willing to cover the costs of transportation and exhibition, but eventually left as well. Moya del Pino, saddled with his enormous paintings, felt abandoned. Returning them to Spain was out of the question: the expedition had no money for transportation, and their size made them difficult to store, let alone move. Years of painstaking work, a royal commission, and the support of prominent cultural and diplomatic figures had brought him across the Atlantic… but left him with no way to complete the journey.
He was now effectively penniless in a city where he knew few people.
The irony was severe. Moya had undertaken the Velázquez copies in the belief that faithful reproductions could open the doors of great art to audiences far beyond the walls of the Prado. In America, audiences had come in extraordinary numbers, and critics had recognized the achievement. And nobody could have predicted the upheaval brewing in Spain's political situation. What had failed was not the artistic idea, but the financial and institutional structure intended to sustain it.
The forty-three paintings that had occupied so much of his life were stuck in San Francisco, facing exorbitant storage costs. So was Moya, far from home, facing an uncertain future. With the exhibition's finances in ruins and no clear way back to Spain, he would have to find a way to begin again. And that is how Moya's life took an entirely different direction.
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To see some of José Moya del Pino’s copies of Velázquez, see the Velázquez section of the Catalog of Works on this website. (Few images of the actual paintings exist, as the current location of most of them is unknown; most of the images in that section were scanned from the black & white "Exhibiciones Velázquez" program.)
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* San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 1925.
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