Historical scope

This is a vast exhibition, almost intimidatingly, almost bewilderingly so. Not so much because of the number of objects – although the 150 artifacts it contains must be at the top end of anybody’s ability to really process and appreciate. No, it’s the scale of the subject matter. The poster and promotional material gives the impression that it’s largely an art exhibition but this is way wrong. In fact it’s more of a historical exhibition which aims to give an overview of Spanish cultural history from the earliest times, from around 2,500 BC, to the time of the Great War. Imagine an exhibition which set out to give an overview of British culture starting with the earliest finds at Stonehenge and going century by century through to the War.

But more than that, it also aims to cover the cultural history of Spain’s colonies in the New World i.e. central and South America. Imagine one exhibition which set out to cover the complete cultural history of Britain and its empire! That’s what I mean by the scale and scope of the thing being challenging.

So there are paintings, yes, lots of paintings, quite a few by masters of the Spanish tradition – but there is a lot, lot more besides, lots of other types of object and artifact. At places across the website the RA use the strapline ‘Take a journey through 4,000 years of art-making across Spain and Latin America’ and that’s closer to the mark.

The Hispanic Society

The key fact to understanding the exhibition is given in its sub-title, ‘Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York was founded in 1904 by philanthropist Archer M. Huntington in a set of buildings commissioned specially for the collection and which remain its home to this day. It is home to the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.

So this exhibition is by way of presenting the greatest hits of the HSM&L’s collection. It contains some 150 works, including:

• masterpieces by Zurbarán, El Greco, Goya and Velázquez
• objects from Latin America including stunning decorative lacquerware
• sculptures, paintings, silk textiles, ceramics, lustreware, silverwork, precious jewellery, maps, drawings, illuminated manuscripts

The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms and because each one makes such huge leaps in place and time and culture this seems the most manageable way of summarising it.

Room 1. The Iberian Peninsula in the Ancient World

A glass case of fine silver torcs and bracelets and suchlike made 2400 to 1900 BC by the so-called Bell Beaker people. By the third century BC the peninsula was inhabited by the people the Romans called the Celts.

The Palencia Hoard by unknown artists (172 to 50 BC)

Quite quickly we’re on to the Roman colonisation, consolidated in the first century BC. The room contains a floor mosaic of Medusa and a breath-taking marble statue of the goddess Diana.

I was surprised there was no mention of the Carthaginians who colonised eastern Spain and exploited its famous silver mines, something I read about in Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010) among other sources.

Moving swiftly we beam forwards to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century AD and the arrival of the Visigothic tribes. There’s a case with a lovely cloisonné belt buckle from the 6th century, reminiscent of the much better one from the Sutton Hoo horde.

Room 2. Al-Andalus

In 711 Arab and Berber invaders overran the Visigothic kingdom and installed their own Islamic governments. The territory came to be known as al-Andalus. In 756 Abd al Rahman I named himself Caliph and established a celebrated court in Córdoba. The peninsula remained under Muslim rule for the next 700 years with power moving between different dynasties and power centres. The room contains some stunning fabrics.

Alhambra silk from Nasrid, Granada (about 1400)

Among the most prized works by Muslim artisans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were ceramics and this room contains a lot of plates and bowls.

Deep Plate by an unknown artist (1370s)

This plate is made of tin-glazed earthenware and has been given an iridescent finish by applying a very thin layer of metal oxide. Potters would glaze with tin, lead, copper, silver, gold, or platinum, depending on availability and the desired outcome. For added extravagance, some of the dynamic patterns have been painted in vibrant (and very expensive) cobalt blue. In the centre is a coat of arms of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Catalonia, the Despujol. Designs like this were ostentatious showpieces for Europe’s rich and powerful. The two small holes at the top of this plate indicate that it was designed to be hung as art on a wall rather than piled with food on a table.

Locks and knockers

My favourite case in this room displayed eight or so fine metalwork door knockers and chest locks. The Hispanic Society’s collection of ironwork comprises some 300 pieces, including door knockers, pulls, locks and lock plates. I liked their medieval feel and especially the way they incorporate animals and imaginary beasts, such as a lizard, a wolf and a dragon, with intricate geometric designs influenced by Islamic tradition.

Two metal door knockers, on the left in the shape of a crab’s claw, on the right a bird with a long dropping neck (both around 1500)

The Reconquista

Throughout the Middle Ages Christian kings from the north fought the Muslim invaders, without much luck. The pace of military campaigning picked up from the 11th century onwards. This came to be known as the Reconquista and was the west Mediterranean equivalent of what, in the East, came to be known as the Crusades. Unlike the Crusades it was successful and in 1492 the last Muslim state, of Granada, was overthrown under forces led by the joint monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain.

Slavery

The Spanish pioneered the European slave trade from Africa. The ruthless and forceful displacement of Africans to the Iberian Peninsula began as early as the 1440s. Following the discovery of the Americas the majority of enslaved Africans were trafficked directly across the Atlantic where, throughout the American continent, they were forced to work on plantation and in the notorious silver mining industry. By the sixteenth century, it is thought that Spain had the largest population of enslaved Africans in Europe.

Room 3. Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Room 3 is the biggest in the exhibition and the overwhelming impression in entering is the arrival of painting. There are works by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velasquez and Zubaran. But, as with the exhibition generally, there’s much more to it than painting. The room covers the period from the triumph of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile over the Moors in 1492. They began a programme of forced conversion and violent expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities as they bid to unite their realms under the Catholic faith. The Catholic Monarchs were followed by Charles V (1500 to 1558) and Philip II (1527 to 1598).

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known as the Age of Gold. This was funded by slave labour in the New World, and especially the gold and silver mined by forced labourers working in terrible conditions in Spain’s Central American colonies.

It was also the Age of the Counter-Reformation when first Charles V then Philip II took it upon themselves to reinforce the Catholic Church at its most fierce and repressive (these were the glory years of the Spanish Inquisition which became notorious across Europe). Spanish rulers commissioned art which emphasised a sickly, sentimental, reactionary form of Catholicism or produced lickspittle portraits of terrifying, brutish kings, politicians and generals.

The Penitent St Jerome by El Greco (1600)

The most prominent painters of the period included artists such as El Greco, who moved to Toledo in 1577, and Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter to Philip IV in 1623. I appreciate that El Greco (1541 to 1614) is a classic of European art but I have never liked him. The milky eyes of his sickly saints and martyrs staring up into Catholic heaven have always revolted me.

The room is packed with lots of other nauseating Catholic imagery including an ascension, an altarpiece, images of Mary and Martha, a Mater Dolorosa, crucifixions, mothers and babies, a Pieta, images of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a big painting of St Emerentiana by Francisco de Zurbarán which is dire. The depiction of the fabric is impressive in a stiff late medieval way, but the face is awful.

Revolting in a different way are the power-worshipping portraits by the likes of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 to 1660). There’s a huge portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who carried out negotiations with the young Prince Charles who came to Spain to sue for the hand of the Infanta in 1623. With characteristic arrogance Olivares insisted that Charles could only marry her if he promised to convert to Catholicism along with all the British court. This was a non-starter and explains why Charles went onto the court of France and won the hand of Henrietta Maria from the much more pragmatic Henry IV.

Spanish wars of repression

The huge wealth Spain creamed from its black slaves and the enslaved Aztecs and Incas in the New World paid not only for a re-energised and harshly reactionary Catholic Church, but for its wars of conquest designed to undo the Reformation and reimpose Catholicism on Protestant countries. It was with this aim that King Philip II launched the Armada in 1588 which was designed to defeat the English, overthrow their queen, Elizabeth I, who, along with most of the aristocracy would have been treated as heretics and executed, and then a foreign ideology (Catholicism) imposed on the entire population, anyone complaining being subjected to summary execution.

Luckily the English navy disrupted the Spanish fleet and the ‘Protestant wind’ did the rest. But the Netherlands was not so lucky. Originally under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, with the end of their line the Netherlands fell to the house of Hapsburg, which itself inherited the Spanish throne. Largely Protestant the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic rule in the 1570s starting the prolonged period of rebellion which is known as the Eighty Years War. In 1567 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba arrived with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers and proceeded to institute a reign of terror. As Wikipedia puts it:

Acting on orders of Philip II of Spain, Alba sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.

There was not a lot of difference between this and the Nazi conquest of the Low Countries 400 years later. None of this is mentioned in any of the wall labels. Spain’s role as arch enemy of free Protestant countries in the 16th and 17th centuries simply goes unmentioned.

The Duke of Alba in 1549 by Anthonis Mor, the man who ‘sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.’

Besides paintings testifying to the lachrymose religiosity of the Counter Reformation and the genocidal macho-ness of Spain’s generals, the room also includes:

• many early maps of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast and the New World
• a baptismal font, a pilgrim flask, a chalice, a reliquary cross, a pendant, a huge bishop’s brocade
• a set of illuminated manuscripts including a Book of Hours
• glazed earthenware, goblets and suchlike

My favourite piece was much earlier, a medieval wooden carving of St Martin on a horse from the late 15th century before the Reformation split Europe, before Columbus discovered the New World, before art became really professionalised – from a simpler time.

St Martin 1450 to 1475 by unknown artist

Room 4. Colonial Latin America I: People and place

A huge modern map on the gallery wall gives a sense of the breath-taking amount of territory Spain arrogated to itself after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the New World on his failed attempt to find a western passage to India. He had, in fact, landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean which he renamed San Salvador (in modern-day Bahamas).

His mistaken belief that the natives were Indians condemned indigenous peoples in north, central and south America to be known as ‘Indians’ for centuries afterwards, despite belonging to a huge range of peoples, languages and conditions and explains why the Caribbean islands are erroneously referred to as the West Indies to this day.

The Spanish conquistadors promptly conquered the empires of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca, massacring them where necessary, setting the survivors to work as forced labour on huge plantations or in the silver mines which they discovered in 1547 at Potosí in the southern highlands of Bolivia.

Spain divided its vast territories in the Americas into two viceroyalties: Nueva España (New Spain, modern-day Mexico and Guatemala), and Peru (which included Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). Later, additional viceroyalties were created: Nueva Granada (made up of Colombia and Venezuela) and Mar de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay).

Spain was to rule over this huge colonial empire until independence movements in the 1820s forced them to relinquish these territories allowing for the emergence of modern nation states.

Race rules – apartheid

The conquering Spanish implemented a strictly hierarchical society based on purity of bloodlines and skin tone denominating ‘casta’ (caste). Close ties to Spain and white skin elevated the status of the individual: ‘peninsulares’ (literally, those from peninsular Spain) dominated the colonial administration; followed by ‘criollos’ (creoles), those of Spanish (or European) descent born in the Americas; ‘mestizos’, those of mixed parentage; and finally ‘indígenas’, those of indigenous descent. At the bottom of the pile were the tens of thousands black African slaves.

This room contains a lot of surveys and maps, for example several surveys of the new settlement of Mexico City, and including the famous World Map of 1526 by Giovanni Vespucci. This map was a copy of the padrón real, Spain’s master nautical chart which was kept in a secret location in Seville. It’s thought this ornate version was a gift for King Charles V. It includes decorative details such as pictures of ships in the ocean, camels and elephants across Africa, a collapsing Tower of Babel, and the Red Sea coloured a vivid scarlet.

Detail of Giovanni Vespucci’s World Map (1526)

Room 5. Colonial Latin America II: Decorative Arts

In the decades after the conquest there was, surprisingly enough, a flourishing of the arts. Indigenous artists who were skilled with local materials, techniques and iconography adapted their work to satisfy European tastes and religious beliefs. As it was prohibitively expensive to import domestic objects from Spain there was significant demand for locally produced decorative arts. This gallery contains 20 or so examples of this hybrid art including a number of bateas or trays, vases, caskets, bowls and jars, and an impressive shawl.

Shawl (1775 to 1800) by unknown artist

A large rectangular shawl with fringed ends, the rebozo, is perhaps the most enduring of all traditional Mexican garments. It was first recorded in the 1580s, and is still worn by women across the country today.

Room 6. Colonial Latin America III: Religious Art

A room devoted to art and artifacts created for the Spanish Catholic church which moved quickly to lay out a network of ecclesiastical districts or dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops alongside a far-reaching programme of church and convent building – all designed, of course, to convert the entire native population.

Not many Spanish artists volunteered to go and live in the New World so the religious authorities had to rely on converting and then training indigenous artists. These created fresco cycles, paintings and polychrome sculptures which were made in vast quantities, likewise fine ornamented silver and gold objects, and fabrics.

This gallery contains a range of religious paintings, sculpture and other objects from across the Americas that reveal how local artists used local materials and adapted traditional techniques, incorporating pre-Columbian symbols or other local references such as flora and fauna in their work.

The room contains a number of dubious paintings of varying levels of amateurishness and kitsch, one incorporating fish scales into its surface. The objects, such as lamps, are more persuasive. But the standout item, and one of the highlights of the exhibition, is the set of four small sculptures of figures demonstrating the four states of people after death, namely a rotted skeleton covered in maggots, a flame-red soul burning in hell, a pale white naked person undergoing the torments of purgatory, and a dressed and serene personage enjoying the bliss of heaven.

The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven attributed to Manuel Chili, called Caspicara (around 1775)

Room 7. Goya

The Spanish are everso proud of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828) but a visit to the National Gallery’s exhibition Goya Portraits back in 2015 destroyed my respect for him. That exhibition revealed Goya to be a shockingly bad painter, particularly of portraits. He looks like a bad caricaturist. At one point in that exhibition they had hung Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington alongside the portrait by British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, and there was no comparison. The Lawrence portrait is a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait of a noble hero. The Goya portrait is a murky unfinished image of a doubtful, rather haunted-looking man.

In this room there are only six or so works, three big paintings and three small sketches. To my astonishment the Spanish curator of the exhibition, Guillaume Kientz, makes the wild claim that Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba is Spain’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, a lodestone, a high water mark of the art of painting. Really? I think it’s dire.

The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya (1797)

The background is drab and dead, her posture is stiff, and her face! And yet the curators are so confident that this is a great European masterpiece that they made it the poster for this exhibition. The fact that she is pointing with her right hand to the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) written in the sand only make it seem more clumsy, gauche and amateurishness.

Luckily, the room has a redeeming feature, which is a display of three small drawings from what came to be called Albums A and B. These small-scale sketches were to culminate in the better known series of sketches known as Los Caprichos. Goya’s depiction of faces in these is still dire, but the sketches aren’t about the faces, they are about striking and often unusual physical postures and positions, capturing the activities of everyday life of people and peasants with swift, vivid strokes.

This smudgy reproduction doesn’t do justice to the dynamic energy of the original sketch, the excellence of composition, the straining man’s calf muscles, the woman’s hauntingly blank face sketched in with ink. Million times better than the silly duchess standing on a beach.

Peasant Carrying a Woman by Francisco de Goya (1810)

Room 8. Sorolla, Zuloaga and the Hispanic Society

Now, at long last, after what seems like an immensely long and exhausting journey, we finally enter ‘recent’ history i.e. the twentieth century. This is the last proper room of the exhibition and it contains a dozen or so huge paintings, 3 or 4 of them by ‘the Spanish Impressionist’, the master of light, Joaquín Sorolla.

The wall label gives an account of Archer Huntington’s founding of the ‘Spanish Museum’ in New York which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Soon after, Huntington visited Europe, where he saw works by the contemporary Spanish painters Ignacio Zuloaga in Paris and Joaquín Sorolla in London. Archer immediately planned to exhibit their work at
the Hispanic Society the following year as well as setting about buying works by other contemporary Spanish artists including Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Isidre Nonell and José Gutiérrez Solana.

Sorolla and Zuloaga can be seen as presenting differing views of Spain, from the lovely sunlit world of Sorolla to the darker vision of Zuloaga which is why the curators have hung them on opposite walls.

After the Bath by Joaquín Sorolla (1908)

Sorolla is less like an impressionist than the Spanish equivalent of John Singer Sargent, but painting in a Mediterranean setting drenched with light. His paintings look best from the other side of the room where the details of the composition fade a bit and the main impact comes from the drama of light and shade.

Possibly my favourite painting in the whole exhibition was Ignacio Zuloaga’s ‘Lucienne Bréval as Carmen’ from 1908. Why? Because I think I’m right in saying that she is the only human being in the exhibition’s 60 or so paintings of people who is happy, who is laughing. After scores of black-clothed clerics, members of the Inquisition and brutal, exterminating generals on the one hand, and countless Immaculate Conceptions of the Holy Virgin Mary and El Greco saints looking milky-eyed up to a heaven pullulating with baby angels, how lovely to come across an actual human being looking like they’re enjoying being alive.

Lucienne Bréval as Carmen by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1908)

As usual this internet copy isn’t a patch on the size and vibrancy of the original. The more I looked the more relaxed and happy I felt and so so relieved to have escaped the centuries of bleak Catholic oppression.

Room 9. Vision of Spain

More Sorolla. Following the success of the Hispanic Society’s exhibition in 1909, Huntington and Sorolla embarked on an ambitious project that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Huntington wanted him to paint a series of murals for the Hispanic Society’s main building. Originally he wanted scenes from Spain’s long colourful history but Sorolla demurred – he wasn’t that kind of painting. The project evolved into the idea for a series of fourteen monumental canvases depicting the peoples, costumes and traditions of different regions of the country and to be titled ‘Vision of Spain’.

Painted between 1911 and 1919, the panoramic series was opened in a purpose-built gallery at the Hispanic Society in 1926, three years after the artist’s death.

Now it would have been very impressive to end the exhibition with one of these finished panels but, for whatever reason, the curators haven’t. Instead, the final room is a long narrow gallery in which is hung a preparatory sketch for the panels.

The wall label tells us that Sorolla produced around 80 of these preparatory studies, painted in gouache. They display a more sketchy, expressionist approach than the final work along, with modern processes such as the collaging technique papier collé.

This is sort of interesting but not as impressive as the final thing would have been. In fact it’s an odd, parochial, anti-climactic way to end an exhibition which, in its central rooms, encompassed the military and religious history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Sketch for the Provinces of Spain: Castile by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1912 to 1913)

In-depth video

Thoughts

Two thoughts:

1. The end of the exhibition – and so, presumably, the Society’s collection – is strangely incomplete. What I mean is, they have Goya, in 1797 and 1810 and then…Sorolla from 1908: what happened in between? What happened in Spanish art between Goya and Sorolla? There appears to be a big hole in the collection. In France we got reams of Salon art but also Courbet and then the amazing achievement of the impressionists and post-impressionists. Even in unartistic England we had lots of anecdotal and social art and then the pre-Raphaelites morphing into the ‘Olympians’ and then atmospheric fin-de-siècle art with outstanding individuals such as Aubrey Beardsley. Did Huntingdon not buy anything of 19th century Spanish art because he wasn’t interested, because there was nothing worth buying? It’s a big gap.

And then the 20th century. I appreciate Huntingdon was buying in the Edwardian period but…did the trustees of the collection agree not to purchase anything after his commissioning of Sorolla’s ‘Vision of Spain’, nothing from 20th century Spanish culture? For example, by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali? And, as I understand it, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938 was central to Spain’s modern history leading, as it did, to the fascist dictatorship of General Franco which only ended in 1975.

I don’t know what exactly you’d include in the collection or exhibition to cover this period – I’m just saying that the omission of artifacts from almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries feels very strange and surely undermine the collection’s claim to represent ‘Spanish culture’. The last two hundred years are, arguably, the most important part of any modern nation’s history and culture. Which brings me to a bigger question:

2. What is a nation’s culture? I know that the curators at the British Museum or Tate Britain would agree with the curators of this exhibition that a national culture is somehow captured or conveyed by rooms full of medieval ceramics, ancient maps, old paintings and church accessories. But is it? Would you say that the ‘culture’ of Britain would be adequately conveyed by some Roman mosaics, a few medieval church artifacts, a handful of Jacobean paintings and some works by John Singer Sargent (the rough equivalent of Sorolla)? Pretty obviously, no. That would just be a collection of miscellaneous historical objects masquerading as a portrait of a culture.

Surely you’d need to turn to sociologists to learn what a real culture consists of – its language and religion, its human and physical geography, the climate, the agriculture and the traditional foods arising from it (beef and beer in England, tapas, paella and wine in Spain), its laws and customs and traditions, the things that make it unique – and then how it survived the storms and disasters of the 20th century and has fared in the post-industrial, multicultural world of the last 30 years or so.

I understand the aims of this collection and this exhibition, I see its strong points, I marvel at its breadth and detail. But in a sense, isn’t a living, breathing ‘culture’, as lived by a nation’s people, precisely what is missing from this exhibition?

Related links

• Spain and the Hispanic World continues @ the Royal Academy until 10 April 2023
• Download the large print guide i.e. all the wall labels
• Hispanic Society website

Related reviews

• Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light @ the National Gallery (April 2019)
• Peru: a journey in time @ the British Museum (December 2021)
• Goya: The Portraits @ the National Gallery (November 2015)
• Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album @ The Courtauld Gallery (March 2015)

• The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009)