Claudia (Heide -) Hopkins
Durham University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Honorary Professor in Hispanic Art, Former Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art (2020-2023)
Claudia Hopkins is Professor of Art History at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She is also Honorary Professor at Durham University, where she served as the Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American between 2020 and 2023. She has wide-ranging interests in the History of Art and specialist knowledge of Hispanic art and culture. She is interested in issues of identity, constructs of self and others, translation theory/postcolonial theory, particularly in the context of the nineteenth- and twentieth century.
In 2018 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to complete a monograph on Spanish attitudes to al-Andalus and North Africa in Spanish painting: The Orient Within: Spanish Art and Identity 1833 to 1956 ( Bloomsbury, New York, forthcoming, summer 2024).
Her interest in Spain and Orientalism stems from her doctoral research, which focused on the Spanish polymath, and first University professor of Arabic in Spain, Pascual de Gayangos, and his significance to the development of Anglo-American Hispanism. The book 'Pascual de Gayangos: a Nineteenth-Century Spanish Arabist' (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), jointly edited with Cristina Álvarez, is the first English-language study of Gayangos and the outcome of a fruitful collaboration of art historians, Hispanists and Arabist scholars from Britain, North America and Spain. She contributed a substantial part to this book, which has been described in the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies (vol.21.3, 2010) as “an important contribution to the study of the history of Oriental studies, which presents a much more nuanced picture than the clear-cut divisions often inferred from Said’s Orientalism”.
Claudia Hopkins is also a curator. She was part of of the curatorial team of the exhibition 'The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso' (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, July – October 2009). For details, see
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/368/the-discovery-of-spain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8BdwJ6uc2Y
She is the curator of the 2021 exhibition "Romantic Spain: David Roberts-Genaro Pérez Villaamil", Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (7 Oct. 2021-16 Jan. 2022), and the editor and main author of the related exhibition catalogue, which won the inaugural Jonathan Brown Award from the US-based Society of Iberian Global Art (SIGA). Named for the renowned scholar, professor and curator Jonathan Brown (1939–2022), this award recognizes exceptional achievement in an exhibition catalogue dedicated to an Iberian or global Iberian theme.
She is associate editor of the Getty-funded journal ART IN TRANSLATION.
Between 2015 and 2020 she led, with I.B.Whyte, a major collaborative research and translation project on 20th-c. European art criticism on US American art, funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The main outcome is the two-volume anthology of European writing on American art during the Cold War period:
Hot Art, Cold War - Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (Routledge, 2020)
Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (Routledge, 2020).
Address: https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/zurbaran/
In 2018 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to complete a monograph on Spanish attitudes to al-Andalus and North Africa in Spanish painting: The Orient Within: Spanish Art and Identity 1833 to 1956 ( Bloomsbury, New York, forthcoming, summer 2024).
Her interest in Spain and Orientalism stems from her doctoral research, which focused on the Spanish polymath, and first University professor of Arabic in Spain, Pascual de Gayangos, and his significance to the development of Anglo-American Hispanism. The book 'Pascual de Gayangos: a Nineteenth-Century Spanish Arabist' (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), jointly edited with Cristina Álvarez, is the first English-language study of Gayangos and the outcome of a fruitful collaboration of art historians, Hispanists and Arabist scholars from Britain, North America and Spain. She contributed a substantial part to this book, which has been described in the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies (vol.21.3, 2010) as “an important contribution to the study of the history of Oriental studies, which presents a much more nuanced picture than the clear-cut divisions often inferred from Said’s Orientalism”.
Claudia Hopkins is also a curator. She was part of of the curatorial team of the exhibition 'The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso' (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, July – October 2009). For details, see
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/368/the-discovery-of-spain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8BdwJ6uc2Y
She is the curator of the 2021 exhibition "Romantic Spain: David Roberts-Genaro Pérez Villaamil", Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (7 Oct. 2021-16 Jan. 2022), and the editor and main author of the related exhibition catalogue, which won the inaugural Jonathan Brown Award from the US-based Society of Iberian Global Art (SIGA). Named for the renowned scholar, professor and curator Jonathan Brown (1939–2022), this award recognizes exceptional achievement in an exhibition catalogue dedicated to an Iberian or global Iberian theme.
She is associate editor of the Getty-funded journal ART IN TRANSLATION.
Between 2015 and 2020 she led, with I.B.Whyte, a major collaborative research and translation project on 20th-c. European art criticism on US American art, funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The main outcome is the two-volume anthology of European writing on American art during the Cold War period:
Hot Art, Cold War - Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (Routledge, 2020)
Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (Routledge, 2020).
Address: https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/zurbaran/
less
Uploads
Conference Presentations (SELECTION OF) by Claudia (Heide -) Hopkins
After Modesto Cendoya’s replica of the Alhambra at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels in 1910, Spanish interest in Andalusí architecture developed in different spheres, often in strongly politicised contexts. In the early Francoist period, it loomed large in the colonial rhetoric of a ‘Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood’ and ‘eternal convivencia’ expressed, for instance, in official art exhibitions in Madrid in the early 1950s - a few years before Moroccan independence. Andalusí heritage too was mobilised as soft power to impress the International Federation of Landscape Architects during a tour of the gardens in Seville, Granada, and Cordoba. In contrast, the experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar produced a deeply disorientating vision of the Alhambra in 1953. By then the reflections by a group of modernist architects, led by Fernando Chueca Goitia, culminated in the Alhambra Manifesto, a landmark in the re-evaluation of the Nasrid complex as ‘pure architecture’ in order to forge a new path for a modern Spanish architecture. Although the political agendas of these interventions differ, the common denominator is the search for a national identity through architecture. This issue continued to drive the narratives around Andalusí heritage developed and contested in the early twenty-first century.
Adopting a contrapuntal approach, this paper focuses on perceptions of Bertuchi and Sarghini in pre- and post-colonial times, starting with their participation in exhibitions organised by Spain’s colonial administration in 1950s Madrid. In these politicised contexts, their works were appreciated as nostalgic evocations of medieval Iberia under Muslim rule (al-Andalus) and its continuity in Morocco. According to the official Spanish discourse, Spaniards and Moroccans formed a ‘brotherhood’, an idea that justified Spain’s presence in North Africa. From a Moroccan perspective, the memory of al-Andalus was a source of pride, nurturing Moroccan nationalism.
Today Bertuchi and Sarghini are on display in the Centro de Arte Moderno de Tetouan. Both artists are presented as founding figures whose works evoke the ‘historical memory of Andalusia and Tetouan’.Their works also continue to be exhibited in other spaces in Morocco and Andalusia. Examining the reception of their work, this paper challenges overfamiliar understandings of Orientalism as a discourse that excludes Islamic cultures from European identity.
Spanish Orientalism is generally an under-researched area. This paper contributes to widening our perspectives.
Paper presented at the 'Forum für Kunst auf der Iberischen Halbinsel und Iberoamerika', 35. Kunsthistorikertag, University of Göttingen, 2019; and chapter of my forthcoming book 'The Orient Within. Spanish Art and Identity 1833-1956'.
This session builds on recent research by historians of art, literature and culture, whose work has revealed that the European discourse on the Islamic world is much more polyphonic than traditional postcolonial theory assumed. The session invites papers that examine 19th- and 20-century visual responses to Spain’s Islamic past and Spain’s nearest ‘Orient’, Morocco, by both Spanish and non-Spanish artists across all media (architecture, fine art, illustrated books, photography, film, fashion etc.). How did artists translate Spain’s Islamic world into visual formats? How was such imagery produced, viewed, and marketed? What were the artistic, ideological, political, and social positions on which visual responses were grounded? How important were they in the formation of broader attitudes to the Islamic world?
Email proposals for papers to the convenors Claudia Hopkins and Anna McSweeney by 9 November 2015. You can download a paper proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session21
https://vimeo.com/322799014
https://www.khi.fi.it/de/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2019/03/translating-the-history-of-art.php
This session builds on recent research by historians of art, literature and culture, whose work has revealed that the European discourse on the Islamic world is much more polyphonic than traditional postcolonial theory assumed. The session invites papers that examine 19th- and 20-century visual responses to Spain’s Islamic past and Spain’s nearest ‘Orient’, Morocco, by both Spanish and non-Spanish artists across all media (architecture, fine art, illustrated books, photography, film, fashion etc.). How did artists translate Spain’s Islamic world into visual formats? How was such imagery produced, viewed, and marketed? What were the artistic, ideological, political, and social positions on which visual responses were grounded? How important were they in the formation of broader attitudes to the Islamic world?
Email proposals for papers to the convenors Anna McSweeney or Claudia Hopkins by 9 November 2015. You can download a paper proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session21.
Articles, essays, chapters (SELECTION OF) by Claudia (Heide -) Hopkins
In the immediate years after the Second World War, Spain was initially an unwelcoming territory for art from the United States. Franco's regime initially adopted a policy of autarky, and official attitudes to American culture were negative. The political US-Spanish rapprochement in the early 1950s helped facilitate the arrival of modern American art in Spain, but the success of American art in the Peninsula must also be understood in relation to a shift in Franco's cultural exhibition policies in support of Spanish avant-garde artists. In 1963 the work of US artists was creatively coopted by Franco's ingenious curator in order to project a modern and positive image of Spain to audiences at home and abroad.
This chapter - while not denying the pervasiveness of tropes of oriental Spanishness in the Western imagination - argues that the case for a full foreign-made “Orientalization” of Spain has been overstated in scholarship. Beginning with an overview of clichés of Spain as an exotic, alluring, yet stagnant country, the chapter departs from current scholarship on this topic to present evidence of a broader spectrum of foreign and Spanish positions from which Spain’s image was forged and contested, but which have been neglected. For instance, in architectural formalist discourses in Britain and Germany, the architecture of al-Andalus was acknowledged as different from the classical tradition but it was not perceived as a threat for order and logic in architecture. It provided solutions to debates about architectural practice. What matters in the various examples explored here is that the idea of “Moorish Spain” was not employed to denigrate Spain as an exotic, non-European or primitive country. Furthermore, the discourse of Spain’s ‘otherness’ is called into question when bearing in mind foreign responses that emphasize similarities between Spanish and European culture, leveling out difference. In Britain, the Gothic revival in combination with Catholic emancipation led to an active appreciation of Spain’s cathedrals and churches, which had consequences for ecclesiastical architecture and decor. At the same time, artists and art critics appointed Velázquez as a guiding light in their search for a new way of creating modern paintings. Significantly, the chapter also paves the way for investigation into Spanish cultural brokers. If on the one hand, they exploited their supposed exotic identity to their economic and/or political advantage (tourism; art market; colonial ambitions in North Africa), they also ‘spoke back’ to stereotypes. This is exemplified by diverse artists and projects, from the Romantic painter Genaro Pérez Villaamil’s focus on ‘Gothic’ Spain and representations of industrial and urban developments to Joaquín Sorolla’s paintings of modern life. To conclude, to speak of an “Orientalisation” of Spain is too simple a truth. Whilst the term “semi-Orientalisation” goes some way to suggest wider possibilities, it is negatively attached to the notion of mis-representation. This chapter argues for “translation” as a more neutral concept that acknowledges that any form of cultural representation involves manipulation and resemantization. Echoing George Steiner’s ideas on translation, there are innumerable shadings of assimilation and placements of Spanish culture in the nineteenth-century European context, ranging from a complete ‘domestication’ or an at-homeness that we can ascribe to the idea of Velázquez as a catalyst for modern art, all the way to the permanent strangeness and exoticism of Mérimée’s Carmen.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Hispanic-Studies-Companion-to-Nineteenth-Century-Spain/Marti-Lopez/p/book/9780815358244
Chapter included in the book Collecting Murillo in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Isabelle Kent, published by the CEEH in association with The Wallace Collection, 2020. 352 pages; 136 color illustrations
Details about the book and chapter excerpts:
https://www.ceeh.es/en/publicacion/collecting-murillo-in-britain-and-ireland/
With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.
This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.
Books by Claudia (Heide -) Hopkins
Claudia Hopkins (ed.), with four essays by Claudia Hopkins, one essay by Matilde Mateo, and one by Andrew Ginger.
Includes over 100 catalogue entries by Claudia Hopkins and other contributors: Antonio Gámiz Gordo, Antonio Jesús García Ortega, Andrew Ginger, Celia Jiménez Bellido, Briony Llewellyn, , Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, Luis Ruiz Padrón, Carlos Sánchez Díez, Danielle Smith, Martin P. Sorowka.
512 pages; 285 colour illustrations; hardcover, 22 x 27,5 cm. English
Published by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the CEEH and the Instituto Ceán Bermúdez; 2021
The catalogue was awarded the inaugural Jonathan Brown Prize from the Society of Iberian Global Art in 2023. Named for the renowned scholar, professor and curator Jonathan Brown (1939–2022), this award recognizes exceptional achievement in an exhibition catalogue dedicated to an Iberian or global Iberian theme.
Table of Contents
Section 1 Introduction.
“David Roberts/Genaro Pérez Villaamil” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 2. Encounter.
“Seville, summer 1833” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 3. From drawing to print.
“Inventing and popularising the Spanish picturesque” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 4. The search for the exotic.
“From al-Andalus to the East” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 5 Between history and romance.
“The past as a national fantasy” by Claudia Hopkins.
“The pleasure of the imagination” by Matilde Mateo.
Catalogue entries.
Section 6 Progress and modernity.
“Looking forward” by Andrew Ginger.
Catalogue entries.
Abstract
David Roberts (1796–1864) and Genaro Pérez Villaamil (1807–1854) were two of the most important landscape painters of European Romanticism. Their views of Spanish monuments, cities and landscapes, often coloured with a flavour of traditional life, helped to forge a Romantic image of Spain that is still palpable today.
This catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, offers new perspectives on the dialogue between the work of both artists in the context of the cultural discovery of the Spain, North Africa and the Middle East by artist-travellers in the nineteenth century. Adopting a comparative approach, six essays and over 120 catalogue entries written by eleven experts led by Claudia Hopkins, curator of the show and editor of this volume, cover the trajectories of both artists, starting with their first encounter in Seville in 1833.
The authors examine Roberts’s influence on Villaamil in depth for the first time and reveal important differences in their respective visions of Spain. For Roberts, Spain was a timeless and exotic nation. Although Villaamil shared Roberts’s fascination with Andalusia, he shifted attention towards the north and often defied the cultural clichés promoted by the Scottish artist. Villaamil offered a patriotic image of a Catholic Spain, which was opening itself up to progress. By the 1850s, both artists responded in similar ways to modern developments in their respective countries.
The catalogue, which includes unpublished artworks, is richly illustrated with images of drawings, paintings and prints, as well as manuscripts and ceramics, enabling the reader to draw numerous parallels.
After Modesto Cendoya’s replica of the Alhambra at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels in 1910, Spanish interest in Andalusí architecture developed in different spheres, often in strongly politicised contexts. In the early Francoist period, it loomed large in the colonial rhetoric of a ‘Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood’ and ‘eternal convivencia’ expressed, for instance, in official art exhibitions in Madrid in the early 1950s - a few years before Moroccan independence. Andalusí heritage too was mobilised as soft power to impress the International Federation of Landscape Architects during a tour of the gardens in Seville, Granada, and Cordoba. In contrast, the experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar produced a deeply disorientating vision of the Alhambra in 1953. By then the reflections by a group of modernist architects, led by Fernando Chueca Goitia, culminated in the Alhambra Manifesto, a landmark in the re-evaluation of the Nasrid complex as ‘pure architecture’ in order to forge a new path for a modern Spanish architecture. Although the political agendas of these interventions differ, the common denominator is the search for a national identity through architecture. This issue continued to drive the narratives around Andalusí heritage developed and contested in the early twenty-first century.
Adopting a contrapuntal approach, this paper focuses on perceptions of Bertuchi and Sarghini in pre- and post-colonial times, starting with their participation in exhibitions organised by Spain’s colonial administration in 1950s Madrid. In these politicised contexts, their works were appreciated as nostalgic evocations of medieval Iberia under Muslim rule (al-Andalus) and its continuity in Morocco. According to the official Spanish discourse, Spaniards and Moroccans formed a ‘brotherhood’, an idea that justified Spain’s presence in North Africa. From a Moroccan perspective, the memory of al-Andalus was a source of pride, nurturing Moroccan nationalism.
Today Bertuchi and Sarghini are on display in the Centro de Arte Moderno de Tetouan. Both artists are presented as founding figures whose works evoke the ‘historical memory of Andalusia and Tetouan’.Their works also continue to be exhibited in other spaces in Morocco and Andalusia. Examining the reception of their work, this paper challenges overfamiliar understandings of Orientalism as a discourse that excludes Islamic cultures from European identity.
Spanish Orientalism is generally an under-researched area. This paper contributes to widening our perspectives.
Paper presented at the 'Forum für Kunst auf der Iberischen Halbinsel und Iberoamerika', 35. Kunsthistorikertag, University of Göttingen, 2019; and chapter of my forthcoming book 'The Orient Within. Spanish Art and Identity 1833-1956'.
This session builds on recent research by historians of art, literature and culture, whose work has revealed that the European discourse on the Islamic world is much more polyphonic than traditional postcolonial theory assumed. The session invites papers that examine 19th- and 20-century visual responses to Spain’s Islamic past and Spain’s nearest ‘Orient’, Morocco, by both Spanish and non-Spanish artists across all media (architecture, fine art, illustrated books, photography, film, fashion etc.). How did artists translate Spain’s Islamic world into visual formats? How was such imagery produced, viewed, and marketed? What were the artistic, ideological, political, and social positions on which visual responses were grounded? How important were they in the formation of broader attitudes to the Islamic world?
Email proposals for papers to the convenors Claudia Hopkins and Anna McSweeney by 9 November 2015. You can download a paper proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session21
https://vimeo.com/322799014
https://www.khi.fi.it/de/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2019/03/translating-the-history-of-art.php
This session builds on recent research by historians of art, literature and culture, whose work has revealed that the European discourse on the Islamic world is much more polyphonic than traditional postcolonial theory assumed. The session invites papers that examine 19th- and 20-century visual responses to Spain’s Islamic past and Spain’s nearest ‘Orient’, Morocco, by both Spanish and non-Spanish artists across all media (architecture, fine art, illustrated books, photography, film, fashion etc.). How did artists translate Spain’s Islamic world into visual formats? How was such imagery produced, viewed, and marketed? What were the artistic, ideological, political, and social positions on which visual responses were grounded? How important were they in the formation of broader attitudes to the Islamic world?
Email proposals for papers to the convenors Anna McSweeney or Claudia Hopkins by 9 November 2015. You can download a paper proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session21.
In the immediate years after the Second World War, Spain was initially an unwelcoming territory for art from the United States. Franco's regime initially adopted a policy of autarky, and official attitudes to American culture were negative. The political US-Spanish rapprochement in the early 1950s helped facilitate the arrival of modern American art in Spain, but the success of American art in the Peninsula must also be understood in relation to a shift in Franco's cultural exhibition policies in support of Spanish avant-garde artists. In 1963 the work of US artists was creatively coopted by Franco's ingenious curator in order to project a modern and positive image of Spain to audiences at home and abroad.
This chapter - while not denying the pervasiveness of tropes of oriental Spanishness in the Western imagination - argues that the case for a full foreign-made “Orientalization” of Spain has been overstated in scholarship. Beginning with an overview of clichés of Spain as an exotic, alluring, yet stagnant country, the chapter departs from current scholarship on this topic to present evidence of a broader spectrum of foreign and Spanish positions from which Spain’s image was forged and contested, but which have been neglected. For instance, in architectural formalist discourses in Britain and Germany, the architecture of al-Andalus was acknowledged as different from the classical tradition but it was not perceived as a threat for order and logic in architecture. It provided solutions to debates about architectural practice. What matters in the various examples explored here is that the idea of “Moorish Spain” was not employed to denigrate Spain as an exotic, non-European or primitive country. Furthermore, the discourse of Spain’s ‘otherness’ is called into question when bearing in mind foreign responses that emphasize similarities between Spanish and European culture, leveling out difference. In Britain, the Gothic revival in combination with Catholic emancipation led to an active appreciation of Spain’s cathedrals and churches, which had consequences for ecclesiastical architecture and decor. At the same time, artists and art critics appointed Velázquez as a guiding light in their search for a new way of creating modern paintings. Significantly, the chapter also paves the way for investigation into Spanish cultural brokers. If on the one hand, they exploited their supposed exotic identity to their economic and/or political advantage (tourism; art market; colonial ambitions in North Africa), they also ‘spoke back’ to stereotypes. This is exemplified by diverse artists and projects, from the Romantic painter Genaro Pérez Villaamil’s focus on ‘Gothic’ Spain and representations of industrial and urban developments to Joaquín Sorolla’s paintings of modern life. To conclude, to speak of an “Orientalisation” of Spain is too simple a truth. Whilst the term “semi-Orientalisation” goes some way to suggest wider possibilities, it is negatively attached to the notion of mis-representation. This chapter argues for “translation” as a more neutral concept that acknowledges that any form of cultural representation involves manipulation and resemantization. Echoing George Steiner’s ideas on translation, there are innumerable shadings of assimilation and placements of Spanish culture in the nineteenth-century European context, ranging from a complete ‘domestication’ or an at-homeness that we can ascribe to the idea of Velázquez as a catalyst for modern art, all the way to the permanent strangeness and exoticism of Mérimée’s Carmen.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Hispanic-Studies-Companion-to-Nineteenth-Century-Spain/Marti-Lopez/p/book/9780815358244
Chapter included in the book Collecting Murillo in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Isabelle Kent, published by the CEEH in association with The Wallace Collection, 2020. 352 pages; 136 color illustrations
Details about the book and chapter excerpts:
https://www.ceeh.es/en/publicacion/collecting-murillo-in-britain-and-ireland/
With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.
This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.
Claudia Hopkins (ed.), with four essays by Claudia Hopkins, one essay by Matilde Mateo, and one by Andrew Ginger.
Includes over 100 catalogue entries by Claudia Hopkins and other contributors: Antonio Gámiz Gordo, Antonio Jesús García Ortega, Andrew Ginger, Celia Jiménez Bellido, Briony Llewellyn, , Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, Luis Ruiz Padrón, Carlos Sánchez Díez, Danielle Smith, Martin P. Sorowka.
512 pages; 285 colour illustrations; hardcover, 22 x 27,5 cm. English
Published by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the CEEH and the Instituto Ceán Bermúdez; 2021
The catalogue was awarded the inaugural Jonathan Brown Prize from the Society of Iberian Global Art in 2023. Named for the renowned scholar, professor and curator Jonathan Brown (1939–2022), this award recognizes exceptional achievement in an exhibition catalogue dedicated to an Iberian or global Iberian theme.
Table of Contents
Section 1 Introduction.
“David Roberts/Genaro Pérez Villaamil” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 2. Encounter.
“Seville, summer 1833” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 3. From drawing to print.
“Inventing and popularising the Spanish picturesque” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 4. The search for the exotic.
“From al-Andalus to the East” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 5 Between history and romance.
“The past as a national fantasy” by Claudia Hopkins.
“The pleasure of the imagination” by Matilde Mateo.
Catalogue entries.
Section 6 Progress and modernity.
“Looking forward” by Andrew Ginger.
Catalogue entries.
Abstract
David Roberts (1796–1864) and Genaro Pérez Villaamil (1807–1854) were two of the most important landscape painters of European Romanticism. Their views of Spanish monuments, cities and landscapes, often coloured with a flavour of traditional life, helped to forge a Romantic image of Spain that is still palpable today.
This catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, offers new perspectives on the dialogue between the work of both artists in the context of the cultural discovery of the Spain, North Africa and the Middle East by artist-travellers in the nineteenth century. Adopting a comparative approach, six essays and over 120 catalogue entries written by eleven experts led by Claudia Hopkins, curator of the show and editor of this volume, cover the trajectories of both artists, starting with their first encounter in Seville in 1833.
The authors examine Roberts’s influence on Villaamil in depth for the first time and reveal important differences in their respective visions of Spain. For Roberts, Spain was a timeless and exotic nation. Although Villaamil shared Roberts’s fascination with Andalusia, he shifted attention towards the north and often defied the cultural clichés promoted by the Scottish artist. Villaamil offered a patriotic image of a Catholic Spain, which was opening itself up to progress. By the 1850s, both artists responded in similar ways to modern developments in their respective countries.
The catalogue, which includes unpublished artworks, is richly illustrated with images of drawings, paintings and prints, as well as manuscripts and ceramics, enabling the reader to draw numerous parallels.
This peer-reviewed special issue resulted from a panel at the AAH 2016 that examined Spain's relationship with its Islamic history, through the painting, photography, design and architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Paying particular attention to Spain's complex relations with contemporary Morocco, to the rise of nationalist sentiments in the 19th century, and to the emergence of methods of reproduction and copying that allowed Islamic monuments to be reproduced and translated, the resulting articles explore Spain's response to its own 'Orient' through a broad range of media. Includes an editorial and a select bibliography.
Contents:
Anna McSweeney and Claudia Hopkins Editorial: Spain and Orientalism
Ariane Varela Braga The Arab Room of the Palacio de Cerralbo
Asun González Pérez Reconstructing the Alhambra: Rafael Contreras and the Architectural Models of the Alhambra in the Nineteenth Century
Anna McSweeney Mudéjar and the Alhambresque: Spanish Pavilions at the Universal Expositions and the Invention of a National Style
Oscar E. Vázquez Vision, Lamentation and Nineteenth-Century Representations of the End of al-Andalus
David Sánchez Cano Allende el Estrecho (Beyond the Straits): The Photographic Gaze on the Orient in Andalusia and Morocco
Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard Visualizing 'Moorish' Traces within Spain: Orientalism and Medievalist Nostalgia in Spanish Colonial Photojournalism 1909-33
Claudia Hopkins The Politics of Spanish Orientalism: Distance and Proximity in Tapiró and Bertuchi
McSweeney and Hopkins Select Bibliography: Spain and Orientalism
El presente catálogo, que acompaña a la exposición del mismo nombre celebrada en la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, ofrece nuevas perspectivas sobre el diálogo entre la obra de uno y otro en el contexto del descubrimiento cultural de España, el Norte de África y Oriente Medio por los viajeros artistas del siglo XIX. Empleando un enfoque comparativo, once especialistas encabezados por Claudia Hopkins, comisaria de la muestra y directora del volumen, abordan en los seis textos y las más de 120 fichas que lo integran las trayectorias de ambos pintores desde su primer encuentro en Sevilla en 1833.
Aquí se analiza por primera vez en profundidad la influencia de Roberts sobre Villaamil y se señalan las notables diferencias en la visión que cada uno tenía de España. Para Roberts, se trataba de un país exótico y atemporal, mientras que Villaamil, aun compartiendo la fascinación del escocés por Andalucía, volvió su atención más hacia el norte, desmontando los tópicos presentes en la obra de aquél y ofreciendo la imagen de una España católica que se estaba abriendo al progreso y la modernidad. En la década de 1850, ambos ofrecieron una respuesta similar a los cambios que el progreso estaba operando en sus respectivos países.
El catálogo, que incluye obras inéditas, está profusamente ilustrado con dibujos, pinturas y grabados, pero también con manuscritos y piezas de cerámica que permiten al lector establecer numerosos paralelismos.
Claudia Hopkins es catedrática y directora del Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art en la Durham University. Antes de entrar en Durham en 2020, fue profesora de Historia del Arte en la University of Edinburgh y coeditora de la revista Art in Translation, financiada por la Fundación Getty. Hopkins centra sus investigaciones en el arte español de los siglos XIX y XX y en las relaciones culturales angloespañolas. En 2009 hizo aportaciones muy significativas a la exposición The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors. Goya to Picasso (National Gallery of Scotland). Además, ha escrito artículos y capítulos de libros, y ha coeditado los volúmenes Pascual de Gayangos: A Nineteenth-Century Spanish Arabist (con C. Álvarez-Millán, 2009), Orientalism and Spain (con A. McSweeney, 2017) y Hot Art, Cold War (2 vols., con I. B. Whyte, 2020).
Translated into English for the first time from sixteen languages and introduced by scholarly essays, the texts in this volume offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Soviet Union (including the Baltic States), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (GDR). There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.
This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.
Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism.
With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.
This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.
Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism.
This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
List of illustrations
I Introduction
1. The Life of Pascual de Gayangos 1809-1897, Dr Cristina Álvarez Millán (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid)
2. Gayangos and the World of Politics:
Part 1: 'Gayangos and politics in Spain', Miguel Ángel Álvarez Ramos (Independent Scholar, Madrid)
Part 2: 'Gayangos and the Whigs in Britain', Dr Claudia Heide (University of Edinburgh)
II Arabism
3. The Estranged Self of Spain: Oriental Obsessions in the Time of Gayangos, Professor Andrew Ginger (Stirling University)
4. Scholarship and Criticism: The Letters of Dozy to Gayangos (1841-1852), Professor Manuela Marin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicos, Madrid)
III Gayangos in the English-Speaking World
5. Gayangos in the English context, Professor Richard Hitchcock (University of Exeter)
6. Gayangos: Prescott's Most Indispensible Aid, C. Harvey Gardiner (former Professor at the Southern University of Illinois)
7. 'Más ven cuatro ojos que dos' - Gayangos and Anglo-American Hispanism, Dr Claudia Heide (University of Edinburgh)
8. Gayangos and the Boston Brahmins, Professor Thomas F. Glick (Boston University)
IV Gayangos and Material Culture
9. Pascual de Gayangos: A Scholarly Traveller, Miguel Ángel Álvarez Ramos (Independent Scholar, Madrid)
10. Gayangos' Legacy: his son-in-law Juan Facundo Riaño (1829-1901) and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr Marjorie Trusted, V&A.
http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn22/ortiz-echague-reviews-romantic-spain-david-roberts-and-genaro-perez-villaamil
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/ait/files/2022/02/Curley_-critique-dart.pdf
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/ait/files/2022/02/Curley_-critique-dart.pdf
Sorolla’s work in the context of Spain’s Islamic heritage and Spanish artists fascinated by Andalusia.
Event organised by the National Gallery in London as part of the public talks and seminar programme for the exhibition Sorolla : Spanish Master of Light (2019).
Supported by the John Armitage Charitable Trust.
Meet the Expert talk, where Dr Herráez Vossbrink is joined by Professor Claudia Hopkins, Director of Durham University’s Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art, to discuss Roberts's travels throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
https://www.wallacecollection.org/art/collection/meet-the-expert/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1x0LYy4ZEQ
• Watch a feature on the Discovery of Spain exhibition from the Culture Show on YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8BdwJ6uc2Y
Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 7/10/2021 – 16/1/2022
Curator:
Claudia Hopkins
Organizers:
Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, Instituto Ceán Bermúdez and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
The Scottish landscape painter David Roberts (1796–1864) and the Galician artist Genaro Pérez Villaamil (1807–1854) were giants in the topographical art of the Romantic era. Between them they generated several hundred views of landscapes and monuments in Spain – castles, cathedrals, convents, palaces – often with a flavour of local traditional life. Fully versed in the aesthetic conventions of the Picturesque and the Sublime, Roberts and Villaamil created a Romantic image of Spain in the nineteenth century, one that still colours perceptions of the country today.
Roberts’s impact on Villaamil has long been noted by art historians but never before examined in detail. This exhibition offers new perspectives on the artistic dialogue between the two artists in the context of the cultural discovery of Spain, North Africa and the Near East by artist-travellers. Bringing together 120 paintings, drawings, prints, and objects, the exhibition starts with Roberts’ and Villaamil’s first encounter in Seville in the summer of 1833, which changed Villaamil’s approach to landscape painting. It ends with their separate responses to the changing worlds of their respective countries nearly twenty years later.
The exhibition reveals similarities in themes, styles, and media between the two artists, but it also uncovers vital differences in their imaginative responses to everyday life, religion, landscape, history, and the architecture of Spain. Roberts, a Presbyterian Scot, presented Spain as a timeless exotic nation, different from his own. Villaamil shared Roberts’ fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba and the Giralda in Seville, but he also shifted attention to central and northern parts of Spain, projecting a patriotic view of the country as a Christian, Catholic and ultimately modern nation.
If the Peninsular War and Romantic literature had secured Spain a place in the Western popular imagination in the early nineteenth century, the proliferation of illustrated travelogues with views of monuments and landscapes gave Spain a visual identity and turned it into a new tourist destination. Both Roberts and Villaamil were involved in ambitious publishing projects which played a significant part in this process. The exhibition therefore includes a wide selection of lithographs and engravings of their works, revealing how they popularised their artistic visions of Spain.
The exhibition features key works from Spanish and British private and public collections, such as the National Galleries of Scotland, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Prado Museum, the Patrimonio Nacional and others. Many artworks have never been exhibited in Spain before, among them Roberts’ magnificent views of Seville Cathedral, painted in Seville in 1833, which are on loan from Downside Abbey, UK.
https://www.realacademiabellasartessanfernando.com/es/actividades/exposiciones/la-espana-romanticadavid-roberts-y-genaro-perez-villaamil
This catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition of the same name in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, offers new perspectives on the dialogue between the work of both artists in the context of the cultural discovery of the Spain, North Africa and the Middle East by artist-travellers in the nineteenth century. Adopting a comparative approach, six essays and over 120 catalogue entries written by eleven experts led by Claudia Hopkins, curator of the show and editor of this volume, cover the trajectories of both artists, starting with their first encounter in Seville in 1833.
The authors examine Roberts’s influence on Villaamil in depth for the first time and reveal important differences in their respective visions of Spain. For Roberts, Spain was a timeless and exotic nation. Although Villaamil shared Roberts’s fascination with Andalusia, he shifted attention towards the north and often defied the cultural clichés promoted by the Scottish artist. Villaamil offered a patriotic image of a Catholic Spain, which was opening itself up to progress. By the 1850s, both artists responded in similar ways to modern developments in their respective countries.
The catalogue, which includes unpublished artworks, is richly illustrated with images of drawings, paintings and prints, as well as manuscripts and ceramics, enabling the reader to draw numerous parallels.
Table of Contents
Section 1 Introduction.
“David Roberts/Genaro Pérez Villaamil” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 2. Encounter.
“Seville, summer 1833” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 3. From drawing to print.
“Inventing and popularising the Spanish picturesque” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 4. The search for the exotic.
“From al-Andalus to the East” by Claudia Hopkins.
Catalogue entries.
Section 5 Between history and romance.
“The past as a national fantasy” by Claudia Hopkins.
“The pleasure of the imagination” by Matilde Mateo.
Catalogue entries.
Section 6 Progress and modernity.
“Looking forward” by Andrew Ginger.
Catalogue entries.