The Spanish People Have a Path That Leads to a Star
Alberto Sánchez (1895 to 1962) · 1937 original; replica 2001
In front of the museum's old entrance rises a slender grey column twelve and a half metres tall, twisting upward like a plant or a flame and crowned with a small star. It is not obviously a figure or a building, and yet it is unmistakably alive. The sculptor Alberto Sánchez, known simply as Alberto, made it for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris World's Fair of 1937, the same pavilion where Guernica was first shown. Its title is a whole sentence: the Spanish people have a path that leads to a star.
Alberto was a baker's son from Toledo who taught himself to sculpt and became the leading figure of the Vallecas School, a group of artists who found a new abstract language in the bare landscapes of Castile: dry earth, bones, stones, olive trees. Look at the surface of the column, which is worked with ridges and grooves like the stalk of a plant or a furrowed field, and at the way the form narrows and widens as it climbs. It was made of plaster in Paris and stood beside Picasso's painting and Calder's mercury fountain at the pavilion door, a symbol of hope during the Civil War.
The original was lost after the fair, and Alberto went into exile in Moscow, where he died in 1962 without returning to Spain. In 2001 the museum had the sculpture reconstructed at full size from the surviving model and photographs, and placed it here at the Sabatini entrance, where the crowds queuing for Guernica walk past it. Together the two works bring the Republican pavilion of 1937 back to Madrid, a city the Republic lost.
Did You Know? The 1937 pavilion also contained Alexander Calder's Mercury Fountain, which is now in the Miró Foundation in Barcelona.
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