A revealing exploration of Spain's significant impact on American painting in the 19th and early 20th century

El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo--these are but a few of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of Spain's golden age of painting. In this authoritative and handsome book, an enlarged, extended, and revised version of his Golden Age of Painting in Spain, eminent Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period. Focusing on the interaction between art and the socioeconomic and political conditions that prevailed in Spain's golden age, this book offers information about religious beliefs, social attitudes, the activities of patrons and collectors, and how these were absorbed and interpreted by painters. The author sets the history of Spanish paintings within a European context and explores Spain's contact with artistic centers in Italy and the Netherlands. He discusses not only Spanish artists but also such non-Spanish painters as Titian, Ruben, and Luca Giordano, who either worked in Spain or influenced other artists there. Brown also examines the collections of foreign paintings that Spanish noblemen and prelates assembled and how these collections affected the production of art and the social status of the Spanish artist. In this up-to-date and innovative analysis of two hundred years of Spanish painting, Brown describes a country that brilliantly transformed the artistic impulses it received from abroad to fit the needs of its own society.

Art historians have often minimized the variety and complexity of seventeenth-century Spanish painting by concentrating on individual artists and their works and by stressing discovery of new information rather than interpretation. As a consequence, the painter emerges in isolation from the forces that shaped his work. Jonathan Brown offers another approach to the subject by relating important Spanish Baroque paintings and painters to their cultural milieu. A critical survey of the historiography of seventeenth-century Spanish painting introduces this two-part collection of essays. Part One provides the most detailed study to date of the artistic-literary academy of Francisco Pacheco, and Part Two contains original studies of four major painters and their works: Las Meninas of Velázquez, Zurbarán's decoration of the sacristy at Guadalupe, and the work by Murillo and Valdés Leal for the Brotherhood of Charity, Seville. The essays are unified by the author's intention to show how the artists interacted with and responded to the prevailing social, theological, and historical currents of the time. While this contextual approach is not uncommon in the study of European art, it is newly applied here to restore some of the diversity and substance that Spanish Baroque painting originally possessed.

Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.

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The news media have given us potent demonstrations of the ambiguity of ostensibly truthful representations of public events. Jordana Mendelson uses this ambiguity as a framework for the study of Spanish visual culture from 1929 to 1939--a decade marked, on the one hand, by dictatorship, civil war, and Franco's rise to power and, on the other, by a surge in the production of documentaries of various types, from films and photographs to international exhibitions. Mendelson begins with an examination of El Pueblo Español, a model Spanish village featured at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. She then discusses Buñuel's and Dalí's documentary films, relating them not only to French Surrealism but also to issues of rural tradition in the formation of regional and national identities. Her highly original book concludes with a discussion of the 1937 Spanish Pavilion, where Picasso's famed painting of the Fascist bombing of a Basque town--Guernica--was exhibited along with monumental photomurals by Josep Renau. Based upon years of archival research, Mendelson's book opens a new perspective on the cultural politics of a turbulent era in modern Spain. It explores the little-known yet rich intersection between avant-garde artists and government institutions. It shows as well the surprising extent to which Spanish modernity was fashioned through dialogue between the seemingly opposed fields of urban and rural, fine art, and mass culture.