‘Eternal convivencia’: From Madrid’s Painters of Africa to the School of Tetouan

Abstract

The annual Pintores de África exhibitions, organised by Franco’s colonial administration in mid-twentieth-century Madrid, offered audiences a colourful feast of artistic representations of Spain’s colonial territories in Africa, and of Spain’s architectural legacy of al-Andalus. Foregrounding the ideological issues underpinning these exhibitions, this article evaluates the selection of artworks, the programme of events, exhibition catalogues, and reviews. Many writers discussed the artworks with reference to al-Andalus, echoing colonial propaganda. After Moroccan independence (1956), the exhibitions partly lost their purpose, but the memory of al-Andalus was repurposed by Moroccan cultural brokers for the fashioning of their post-colonial artistic identity. The last part of this article reveals the relations between the Painters of Africa exhibitions and the birth of the School of Tetouan. The article not only sheds light on the art, curation, and art writing that took place in the interstices between Spain and Morocco at the end of colonialism, but also illuminates the paradoxical processes underpinning the formation of artistic identity in post-independence northern Morocco. The case study is relevant to global perspectives in History of Art and refigures understandings of East–West relations with which we have become so familiar since Said’s Orientalism of 1978.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• art as soft power
• al-Andalus
• Morocco
• Mariano Bertuchi
• Mohamed Sarghini
• School of Tetouan
• Francisco Franco

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 AGA 81.15653.0001, AGA 81.15653.0003; AGA 81.15654.0001; AGA 81.1564.0004; 81.15655.0003.

2 The article has developed from two conference papers (1) ‘Al-Andalus at the Painters of África exhibitions’ at Artistic Heritage of al-Andalus and National Identity, Humboldt University, Berlin, October 2017, published by the Justi Vereinigung in 2019/20 (Hopkins 2019/20). (2) ‘Moroccan Perspectives’ at the Challenging Orientalism panel, organised by Emily Christensen and Emma Payet at the Association of Art Historians conference, April 2021. The translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. 

3 Castro’s idealised vision of the past contrasted with the alternative view of history, proposed by Claudio Sánchez Albornóz, who regarded the presence of Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain as a mere interlude with no major consequence for the ‘essence’ of Spain (Sánchez Albornóz 1956).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust.

Notes on contributors

Claudia Hopkins

Claudia Hopkins is Professor and Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art at Durham University. Before joining Durham in 2020, she was Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research mostly focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in relation to issues of cultural translation, centre/periphery, and constructs of self and others. Amongst her publications are the edited volumes Orientalism and Spain (2017) with A. McSweeney, and Hot Art, Cold War – European Writing on American Art 1945–1990 (Routledge, 2020, 2 volumes, edited with I.B. Whyte). She is the curator of the recent exhibition Romantic Spain: Genaro Pérez Villaamil and David Roberts (Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2021-2022) and the main author of the exhibition catalogue. Her monograph on Spanish attitudes to al-Andalus and Morocco in Spanish painting, 1833-1956, is forthcoming. She is Associate Editor of the Getty-funded journal Art in Translation.