The Burceña Bridge, c. 1925-1930
Oil on canvas. 100 x 83.5 c
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Acquired in 1940

Considered one of the masterpieces of Basque art of the first half of the 20th century, this urban landscape entered the museum’s collection months before the artist’s death. It is not dated, although its style corresponds to that of Arteta’s artistic maturity, who worked without making concessions to the anecdotal or decorative and resolved the compositions using purely plastic resources. Although the painter has set the scene in a working-class suburb, the painting is neither an exaltation of labour nor a vindication of a social nature.

The main compositional element is the rhomboidal structure of the stays of the iron bridge over the river Cadagua built at the end of the 1870s by the engineer Adolfo Ibarreta to link the Bilbao district of Zorrotza with Burtzena (Barakaldo). Leaning on the railing, a worker contemplates the panorama at his feet, where a white horse with a rider drinking from the river and a boat refer to an arcadian and vanished agrarian world. In the background, as emblems of the industrial present of the area, are a group of workers’ dwellings with cubic volumes and a large chimney.