Art and Identity in Spain, 1833-1956

Richly illustrated with exotic images, ranging from Moorish palaces fantastically imagined by the Romantic painter Genaro Pérez Villaamil to paintings of everyday life in colonial Morocco by Mariano Bertuchi, this is the first history of Spanish Orientalist art in English. It shows how artists visualized Spain's Islamic past (711-1492) and their nearest "Orient" in Morocco for audiences at home and abroad. With the exception of Fortuny, the book introduces many unfamiliar figures, such as Francisco Iturrino, who travelled with Matisse to Morocco, producing novel visions of the exotic. The state-funded annual Pintores de Africa exhibitions, never examined before, provide a vital perspective on how art served Franco's colonial politics based on a "Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood". Hopkins reveals that Spanish Orientalism was inflected by diverse issues (such as national identity, gender anxieties, colonialism, aesthetics) and put to a wide range of uses. The familiar understanding of Western Orientalism in terms of distinct opposition (East/West) is challenged.

Claudia Hopkins is Professor of Art History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She served as the Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art at Durham University between 2020 and 2023, and is Editor of Art in Translation. Recent publications include Romantic Spain. David Roberts and Genero Pérez Villaamil (2021), which won the Jonathan Brown Award of the Society of Global Iberian Art (SIGA) for exceptional achievement in an exhibition catalogue, and the co-edited two-volume Hot Art, Cold War-European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (2020).