Museo del Prado presents "Bosch: The Garden of Dreams" documentary

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Museo del Prado is presenting the documentary Bosch. The Garden of Dreams. Co-produced with López-Li Films and with the sole sponsorship of Fundación BBVA, the Museo del Prado is presenting a documentary on Bosch as part of its wide-ranging programme of activities organised in conjunction with Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition, the most important exhibition to be held to date on this Netherlandish artist.

Open until September 2016, this exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the death of Jheronimus Bosch includes all the artist’s most important triptychs, among them the exceptional loan of The Saint Anthony Triptych from the Museo de Arte Antigua in Lisbon. These works are being shown alongside others lent from leading institutions such as the Albertina and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Washington, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Polo Museale del Veneto in Venice.

Bosch. The Garden of Dreams is being shown in more than 70 cinemas in Spain, as well as in the USA, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Narrated by Professor Reindert Falkenburg, Bosch. The Garden of Dreams is a conversation between writers, historians, art historians, musicians and artists which offers spectators keys to understanding The Garden of Earthly Delights, the artist and his time.

The film’s starting point is Reindert Falkenburg’s thesis that the triptych was a conversation piece at the court of the Nassaus: a dialogue that began 500 years ago in Brussels and which is now revived with the participation of Cees Nooteboom, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Nélida Piñón, Laura Restrepo, Michel Onfray, Miquel Barceló, Cia Guo-Quiang, Isabel Muñoz, José Maria Ballester, Max, Ludovico Einaudi, William Christie, Silvia Perez Cruz, Renée Fleming, the exhibition’s curator Pilar Silva, Philippe de Montebello, John Elliott, Carmen Iglesias, Alejandro Vergara and Xavier Salomon. Artists, writers, philosophers, musicians and scientists discuss the painting’s personal, historical and artistic meanings, bringing this conversatio into the modern age.

The result is a choral reflection on The Garden of Earthly Delights and its creator which includes an account of the historical context in which it was created and the keys to its art-historical interpretation.

The documentary begins with the triptych’s doors opening: “A painting that encourages us to enter in and take part” (William Christie). This introduces the viewer to the painting, which functions as a mirror in which we see ourselves.

“Most people see themselves. When we realise that the work is a reflection of ourselves in front of the painting, as soon as we look inside it we start to dream. It is a mirror image of ourselves.” (R. Falkenburg)

This is a viewer who has changed over the past five centuries:

“This painting has been out there for a very long time, giving out its force, its soul… Before the French Revolution and after the French Revolution; before and after Marxism and before and after Auschwitz.”

“Which means that the painting has always remained the same. The same material object, made of wood and paint.”

“However, our eyes belong to heads whose minds have completely changed.” (Cees Nooteboom)

The film then offers key biographical information on Bosch, the religious brotherhood to which he belonged and the daily inspiration he received from the market in his native city of ’s-Hertogenbosch.

In the words of Nélida Piñón: “No one could make this work without suspecting their capacity to engender a world, to compete with God…”

Pilar Silva, the exhibition’s curator, sums up this capacity as: “Bosch drew like a painter and painted like a draughtsman.”

The Garden of Earthly Delights provides the film’s central focus. A work that has fascinated John Elliott for its realism and for its capacity to “Create this machine capable of lighting up the viewer’s imagination and encouraging us to interpret it without even offering us a clue.” (Reindert Falkenburg)

Bosch was an artist “capable of presenting a much crueller future than his contemporaries could imagine” (Carmen Iglesias)

The Garden is “A day of high fever” for Miquel Barceló, while Orhan Pamuk admires the “patience and joy of the details”, and for Nélida Piñón, “to describe this one would have to invent words.”

From his viewpoint as a philosopher, Michel Onfray has observed: “The most important thing in life is not culture but life. It is people, not killing, not doing harm… Not increasing the world’s misery. And this work is outstanding because that is what it is saying. If it were necessary to destroy works of art, many would have to be destroyed but this one saved.”

For the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Quiang, the painting is “A work in which the space arises from inside time. This is why ‘The Garden’ represents the history of humanity.”

For Ludovico Einaudi it is like a “fantastic opera”.

Finally, Philippe de Montebello observes: “I see it from a pictorial viewpoint and I ask myself ‘Why is it so stirring?’ And I conclude, because it works.”

In Bosch. The Garden of Dreams José Luis López Linares invites the viewer to participate in this fascinating conversation armed with the clues provided by the film’s participants and making use of powerful, exquisite images filmed in ultra-high definition and a zoom that transports us to the big screen.

The documentary has a carefully chosen soundtrack featuring leading international musicians who seem to be writing specially for Bosch. Elvis Costello provides the music for the Cluny tapestries while Lana del Rey’s song Gods and Monsters is an unexpected musical clip that connects surprisingly well with details from the painting.

We also hear Ludovico Einaudi’s tranquil compositions, together with Max Richter Olafur Arnalds and Arvo Pärt’s moving Vater unser.