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.

From the exhilarating impact of Isaac Albeniz at the beginning of the century to today's complex and adventurous avant-garde, this complete interpretive history introduces twentieth-century Spanish music to English-speaking readers. With graceful authority, Tomas Marco, award-winning composer, critic, and bright light of Spanish music since the 1960s, covers the entire spectrum of composers and their works: trends and movements, critical and popular reception, national institutions, influences from Europe and beyond, and the effect of such historic events as the Spanish Civil War and the death of Franco. Marco's penetrating aesthetic critiques are threaded throughout each phase of this rich account. Marco provides detailed coverage of the key figures, induding a chapter devoted entirely to Manuel de Falla--Spain's most celebrated twentieth-century composer--and a panoramic survey of recent arrivals on the contemporary music scene. Exploring the rise and fall of the zarzuela, the author highlights innovative works in this authentic Spanish genre. He analyzes the attempts to find an audience for Spanish opera; demonstrates the flowering of symphonic and chamber music at the beginning of this century; traces currents such as romanticism, impressionism, and neoclassicism; and tracks the influence of Spain's distinctive regional folk traditions. Covering musical innovation after Spain's emergence from its period of isolation, Marco notes the speed with which many composers absorbed the work of Stravinsky and Bartok, the twelve-tone system, aleatory forms, electronic techniques, and other European developments. English-speaking scholars, musicians, critics and general readers have for decades been without full information on the rich and varied work coming out of Spain in this century. This lively history fills a long-felt need and fills it superbly, with the knowledge and insights of a major figure in the musical world.

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.

This detailed bibliographical dictionary constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of the Spanish School, covering artists born in Spain as well as those who worked chiefly in Spain. 16,000 years of Spanish art are documented with consideration paid to each artist's birth and death dates; medium; and bibliographical references. This three-volume work lists approximately 10,000 painters, sculptors, draftsmen, printmakers, architects, and applied artists.

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.