Years ago, when I was teaching in Spain, I discovered a museum that altered my understanding of what it means to be an artist. Born in 1863 in Valencia, Joaquin Sorolla was a well-known painter, plying his craft just as the Modernist movement was picking up speed. I had expected to be immersed in a world of experimentalism and the avante garde; however, I was quickly corrected when I was exposed to the fruits of his labor. I stood in the building that had once been his home and beheld breathtaking works that celebrated the family – his family: his wife and his children. There was a painting of his young wife lying in a billowy white bed with their baby daughter and paintings of children playing on the beach. Later in the self-guided tour, I came across paintings of his wife when she was older and his daughters, no longer children but young women. He had painted his life – captured on the canvas those special milestones that seem to come and go so quickly – and it was beautiful. I was touched. A man who had died long before my birth gifted me and anybody else with eyes to see a glimpse into his father’s soul. The love he had for his wife and children was evident. I was lucky to be tuned into his heart.
For as long as I could remember, the artist had always been the renegade, the outcast, the critical thinker who tore through popular narratives and exposed falsehoods, mocked the haughty. The artist had an edge and was easily recognizable. The artist stood out. The artist performed. The artist did not look typical, and the artist was certainly not domesticated. He was boozy, womanizing Hemingway. She was wounded, suicidal Plath and Woolf. He was psychedelic Thompson and Kerouac and Leary. She was timid, aloof O’Connor and Dickinson. Who was Joaquin Sorolla but a doting husband and father? Yet artist. Accomplished, impactful artist.
James Joyce, born in Ireland in 1882 and author of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, adored his children. He did not shirk his responsibilities as a father, yet his art certainly pushed the boundaries. It was meant to agitate. He was firmly in the Modernist camp.
J.D. Salinger, on the other hand, all but ignored his children as he typed away in a shed in his backyard. Salinger’s work Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey took off where the Modernists left off and issued a scathing critique of the fakeness of modern society with its silly conventions and escapist habits. According to my old definition, he was the consummate artist. I wonder if his kids felt the same.
All three men – Sorolla, Joyce, and Salinger – were dads, and each approached his art uniquely. Sorolla leaned toward his family, Joyce seemed to straddle two worlds, and Salinger was completely consumed by his demons to the detriment of his offspring. Before I stepped foot in the Sorolla museum in Madrid, I had one definition of what it means to be an artist, and in retrospect, it was not a good one. That artist was selfish and even self-important – always on the lookout for an audience. Joyce took a step, in my estimation, in the right direction, but it was a Spanish painter who showed me that a plain ol’ dad could and should say something, too, about other, arguably more important dimensions of the human experience. Parenthood. Raising children. Loving them dearly. The self-sacrifice that husbands and fathers are called to make daily. I did not partake of these paintings in one of the grand museums of Spain but in a building that Sorolla along with his wife and children once called home. My wife, three daughters, and I live in a house in a suburb of Atlanta. It is where I write, where I wrestle with the thoughts I have. Un artista. Soy escritor.
