Sorolla Medals at the Metropolitan Club: The Hispanic Society Goes Black Tie

By Cordelia Wainscott, Society Editor

Some of New York’s grandest institutions sit in the least expected places. The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, which holds one of the finest collections of Spanish art outside Spain, lives at Audubon Terrace on upper Broadway. Its neighbors are bodegas, not Bergdorf’s. Once a year, though, it comes downtown and puts on black tie, and on Thursday, Oct. 29, it did so at the Metropolitan Club), at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.

The occasion was the Society’s 2026 Annual Gala, and the house was full. The Society announced in advance that the dinner had sold out. Those who missed out were invited to Ritmo, the gala’s dance party, which began at 9 p.m. in the same building, so that the honorees could be celebrated twice: once seated, once on their feet.

Three Medals, One Legacy

The evening’s business was the Sorolla Medal, which the Society has awarded since 1924 for contributions to Hispanic art, literature and culture. Clarín noted that past recipients include Queen Sofía of Spain, the collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

This year there were three, as EFE reported from the dinner. The first went to Eduardo Costantini, the Argentine businessman and collector who founded MALBA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. The second went jointly to Gloria and Emilio Estefan. The third honored the life and work of Oscar de la Renta, the Dominican-born designer, and was accepted by his widow, Annette de la Renta.

It was an evening that managed to bring together a Buenos Aires museum, Miami Sound Machine and the most elegant evening gowns of the last half century. That is roughly the territory the Society was founded to cover.

The Collector From Buenos Aires

Costantini was the evening’s intellectual centerpiece. MALBA opened in 2001, built on the collection he had assembled, which includes works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Joaquín Torres-García. He is not shy at auction: in 2021 he paid $34.9 million at Sotheby’s for Kahlo’s “Diego y yo,” then a record for a Latin American artist.

Guillaume Kientz, the Society’s director and a former Louvre curator, explained the choice to Clarín. “The Hispanic Society of America is proud to award the Sorolla Medal to Eduardo Costantini, whose vision and generosity have transformed the landscape of Latin American art,” he said (the translations from Spanish are ours). “As the founder of MALBA, Costantini has built one of the most important cultural institutions in the region, bringing Latin American art to the public of Buenos Aires and the whole world.”

The courtship had begun months earlier. Kientz told Clarín that in May, members of the Society’s board of trustees and its international advisory council traveled to Buenos Aires. They visited MALBA, where Costantini received them personally, and “were able to see firsthand how closely the work of his institution is aligned with our mission of promoting Hispanic art and culture.”

The dinner was also an occasion for an announcement. MALBA Literatura is partnering with the Society’s David Rosenmann-Taub Poetry Center, which is directed by the Argentine poet and scholar Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. Kientz said the arrangement “will extend MALBA’s prestigious writers’ residency to New York, connecting our collections and our communities.”

The Estefans and Mr. de la Renta

The Estefans need no introduction in any room, least of all this one. Both received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. EFE said they were honored for broadening the international reach of Latin music, “from the first international hits of Miami Sound Machine to Gloria Estefan’s solo career and their joint projects.” It also credited Emilio’s long work as a producer championing Latin artists.

The de la Renta medal was, in a sense, the most New York of the three. The designer, who died in 2014, built his house in this city and dressed it for decades. EFE noted that the medal recognized a designer “known for his creations for figures from politics, culture and entertainment,” which is a diplomatic way of describing a client list that ran from first ladies to the front row.

Annette de la Renta, among the city’s most consequential patrons in her own right, accepted on his behalf.

Who Was Expected

In its preview of the evening, Clarín listed the guests expected at the dinner. They included Diane von Furstenberg, Barry Diller, Alex Bolen, the architect Daniel Romualdez and the curator Estrellita Brodsky. Also on the list were Raquel Arbaje, first lady of the Dominican Republic, the artist Christopher Rothko, the comedian Marcello Hernandez and the journalist Lilia Luciano, along with members of the Latin American diplomatic and cultural community.

Whether everyone on the list made it to Fifth Avenue on a Thursday in late October, the published accounts do not say. On paper, at least, it was a seating chart to make a society editor weep with gratitude.

The House That Huntington Built

The setting suited the guest of honor’s taste for grandeur. The Metropolitan Club was founded in 1891 by J. P. Morgan and friends who had been snubbed elsewhere. Its McKim, Mead & White clubhouse on Fifth Avenue has been the city’s most reliably impressive dining room for well over a century.

The Society was founded in 1904 by Archer Milton Huntington, the railroad heir and Hispanist, to preserve and share art, manuscripts, books and documents from Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Its holdings include El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and, most famously, Joaquín Sorolla’s “Vision of Spain.” That is the vast cycle of 14 murals Huntington commissioned from the Valencian painter, which Sorolla finished in 1919. The medal handed out on Thursday bears his name.

For a long stretch the Society was one of the city’s best-kept secrets, a museum one had to know about to find. A gala is the old-fashioned remedy. The Society describes the dinner as its way of raising vital operating support while bringing together leaders from philanthropy, art, business, fashion and politics, which is to say the people who can fund an institution and the people who can make it fashionable.

The honorees went home with their medals and the Society with its operating support. Huntington’s century-old idea, that New York ought to have a proper home for the art of the Hispanic world, has rarely had a better-dressed evening.

Featured image: The Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue. Photo by Ken Lund via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.