Paintings of SPAIN, we adore them - The works of the country's art masters, including Goya and Picasso, come to the Guggenheim

Spain is not just a country, but a collection of sensual cliches: golden sun, scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, shining whitewashed buildings. Travel guides would lead us to a land of red-blooded passions, but a show of Spanish painting at the Guggenheim suggests it's a haven for a less voluptuous kind of ardor: a drive toward self-denial and mortification of the flesh.

With panoramic exhibits on Brazil and Russia, the Guggenheim has made a case before for a national spirit in each country's art. Like those shows, "Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History" follows a thread that stitches together five centuries of art -- in this case a lineage of death, suffering and putrefaction.

Tradition exerted a powerful pull on Spanish artists of all periods, and they returned again and again to depictions of monsters and blood. Theirs were not troubles that could be washed away with a glass of ruddy Rioja.

This is a tightly focused and refined exhibit that doesn't shy away from a theatrical sensibility. The thematic installation compares how Velazquez, Goya, Miro, Zurbaran and Picasso, plus a large cast of second-tier masters, treated religion, history, mythology and scenes of everyday life.

Lamb to the slaughter

The journey up the spiral ramp begins with the topic of still life, illustrated by a disturbing little painting of a lamb flung onto a shelf, its hooves tied together. Fuzzy, gentle and unmistakably dead, it shouldn't be confused with dinner. This is Zurbaran's "Agnus Dei," or Lamb of God: the bloody birth of Christianity embodied in the carcass of an adorable beast.

The Spanish term for a painting of food pregnant with symbolic meaning is bodegon, which literally means "pantry" or "tavern." There are plenty of resonant vittles in this show, ranging from Goya rabbit corpses to Picasso's "Still Life With Sheep's Head." Superficially, these canvases resemble Dutch still lifes of the 16th and 17th centuries, with their platters of meat and fruit signaling that all life is temporary, all pleasure fleeting, all abundance a mere flicker in an eternity of ash.

Yet the hyper-realistic detail that the Dutch lavished on their works -- the highlight on a polished grape, the sheen on a raw oyster -- suggested that what really interested them was the sensuality they were supposed to be condemning. The Spanish painters, on the other hand, did not wink at death: They stared at it obsessively. They depicted not fleeting abundance but grim decay.

One innocently gruesome picture by Antonio de Pereda shows walnuts cracked open like skulls, spilling out their brainlike meat. In Luis Melendez's "Still Life: Fish, Scallions and Kitchen Containers," the fruits of the sea look as if they have been sitting around in the heat. Juan Sanchez Cotan's "Still Life With Cardoon and Parsnips" is the opposite of a cornucopia; it represents the paltry yield of tough soil and hard work. These paintings have a stark, profoundly un-Dutch message about mortality: Go straight to "Decomposition" without passing "Plenty."

That vein of Spanish joylessness runs from the 16th century through Goya in the late 18th century right up to Picasso. His 1947 "Cock and Knife" shows a chicken, not plucked and trussed and ready for the pot, but earlier in the process -- at the instant of its beheading. What Picasso learned from his forebears is that violence is a prerequisite for food, that the pleasures of the senses are bound up with death. (Being a good modern, Picasso puts a Freudian twist on this legacy, and the kitchen scenario is replete with castration anxiety.)

The indirect predecessor to Picasso's scene from a poultry execution is Goya's depiction of a differently brutal meal: "Cannibals Preparing Their Victims." Goya, the rare artist in his straitlaced country to paint the nude, shows bodies dismembering other bodies, thereby radically shortening the chain linking sex and death.

It's no accident that Spain's national sport is a form of ritualized butchery. The imagery of bullfighting, in which metaphorical violence is virtually indistinguishable from the actual sort, runs through Spanish art in a way that, say, soccer never quite captured the imagination of Italian painters. Perhaps it's because of the juxtaposition of haunch and sword, the eroticism of bloodshed.

A mating of sex and religion

If sexuality had to be expressed in such stylized ways, it's because Spain's taboo on nakedness pushed painters to find devious ways of rendering bare skin. Most of them involved the depiction of such outrages as martyrdom. To die for one's religion was noble; to allow oneself to fall into dishabille for it was acceptable, too. And so eroticism glided into spirituality, and painters conflated sexual and religious ecstasy.

Nobody did so more thoroughly than El Greco. In his "Vision of St. John," the holy man, swaddled in a sky-blue robe, extends his arms up to the roiling, purple sky, his limbs like branches of a gnarled tree. The saint is surrounded by writhing, naked bodies -- dead souls awaiting the distribution of heavenly white robes upon the opening of the Fifth Seal.

Picasso followed the form, though not the subject, in his "Winter Landscape" of 1950: the same blue limbs and twisted fingers, the same bilious clouds. Only now the bodies do not resemble trees; they have turned into them. El Greco painted the Word made flesh; Picasso painted the flesh made wood.

Another strain that runs through the Guggenheim show and the history of Spanish art is an undying fascination with the monstrous. For the 17th century Spanish court, dwarfs were ghastly but lovable creatures, and the nobility kept them the way some dog lovers live with wrinkle-faced shar-peis: to set off the relative normality of their own looks.

Pictures of dwarfs, too, became a Spanish genre. Juan Carreno de Miranda painted a pair of portraits -- one clothed, the other naked -- of the fleshy dwarf Eugenia Martinez Vallejo, who was known as La Monstrua ("The Monster"). The show doesn't include Goya's clothed and naked "Majas," but they exert a ghostly presence in this pair.

Rather than seeing dwarfs as ordinary people, Spanish painters tended to see Others -- especially women -- as a half-step away from the grotesque. Just

as life is shadowed by death, beauty

is bound up with repulsion.

Picasso's great contribution was to normalize the grotesque. He rendered many of his human subjects as deformed but abstract. The 1939 "Portrait of Jaime Sabartes" is typical of the way he distended faces, disassembled their features and gave them oddly pigmented complexions.

The show cannot possibly be complete without "Guernica," Picasso's gathering of all these threads into a tapestry of monstrosity and suffering: It remains at its home in the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid. The black-and-white mural had an immediate political cause: The artist painted it in 1937 as a protest against a Fascist air raid during the Spanish Civil War. But in the longer view, it does what Spanish art had always done: channel a pervasive sense of horror and celebrate heroic pain.

The saint, the crippled horse, the agonized bull, the twisted torso -- these constant elements of the Guggenheim show suggest an artistic tradition based on a fierce belief that this life is merely a painful prelude to the next. The great subject of Spanish art is the spasm of vibrancy before the end, the self-regenerating mixture of glory and rot.