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Abstract
This article 1deals with overlooked interactions between art history and colonial discourses within the context of tourism in Spain. It aims to demonstrate the central role played by temporalized narratives of otherness in tourist imaginaries about Spain during the 1950s and 1960s. It focusses on the use of art history as a visual filter through which certain aspects of the country were read and experienced as being stranded in the past, often leading to images of poverty becoming aestheticized. This analysis will throw light on how colonial discourses of temporality and authenticity, rather than ideas of modernization, influenced the international rehabilitation of the Franco dictatorship after the Second World War.
Notes
Notes
1 A previous, shorter version of this text in Spanish was presented at the IV Symposium “Reflexiones sobre el gusto”. See Alicia Fuentes Vega, “La historia del arte como cápsula del tiempo. Imágenes turísticas y temporalidad en la España de Franco”, in El tiempo y el arte. Reflexiones sobre el gusto IV, vol. 2, coords. Alberto Castán Chocarro, Concha Lomba Serrano, and María Pilar Poblador Muga (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2019), 455–466.
2 Keith Moxey [commenting on Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983)], Visual time. The Image in History (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2013), 2.
3 Sabrina Francesconi, Reading Tourism Texts. A multimodal Analysis (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2014), 3.
4 Great Britain, with a large working class eager for cheap holidays and a long-established tradition in the tour operator industry, was instrumental in the take-off of the Spanish boom. See Ana Moreno Garrido, Historia del turismo en España en el siglo XX (Madrid: Síntesis, 2007), 191. American tourism, albeit smaller in numerical terms, represented a key group of interest for the Franco regime, in terms of diplomatic and economic relations. See Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America. Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). As for German tourism, the ideal of the Mediterranean holiday at the Italian Riviera was during the 1960s gradually substituted by Spanish destinations such as Costa Brava or Mallorca. See Anne-Katrin Becker and Margarete Meggle-Freund (curators) ¡Viva España! Von der Alhambra bis zum Ballermann. Deutsche Reisen nach Spanien (Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe: Info Verlag, 2007).
5 The fascination for the Spanish old masters ‒ especially Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya ‒ in Britain and the United States has been studied by scholars like Nigel Glendinning and Richard L. Kagan. The case of Germany also shows prominent examples of artistic hispanophilia ‒ such as that of art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, considered one of the most influential voices in the modern rediscovery of El Greco. See Nigel Glendinning and Hilary Macartney (eds.), Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920: Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010); Richard L. Kagan, “The Spanish Turn: The Discovery of Spanish Art in the United States, 1887–1920,” in Collecting Spanish Art: Spain´s Golden Age and America’s Gilded Age, eds. Inge Reist and José Luis Colomer (New York: Frick Collection / Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica / Center for Spain in America, 2012), 3–23; Eric Storm, “Julius Meier-Graefe, El Greco and the rise of modern art,” Mitteilungen der Carl Justi-Vereinigung, 20 (2008), 113–133.
6 Hans Eberhard Friedrich, Spanien: reisen mit Nutzen und Genuss (Darmstadt: C. W. Leske & Daimler-Benz, 1955), 77. All quotations from non-English-speaking sources are the author’s translations.
7 Henry V. Morton, A Stranger in Spain (London: Methuen & Co, 1955), 159.
8 Bert Boger and Anton Dieterich, España en color: antología ilustrada del pueblo español (Barcelona: DUX, 1956 [1st Stuttgart, 1955]), 20.
9 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: SAGE, 1990), 3.
10 See Martin Selby, “People-Place-Past: The Visitor Experience of Cultural Heritage,” in Culture, Heritage and Representation, eds. Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 39–55.
11 David Crouch, “Flirting with Space: Tourism Geographies as Sensuous/Expressive Practice,” in Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, eds. Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (London: Routledge, 2005), 23–35.
12 Cedric Salter, Introducing Spain (London: Methuen, 1953), 65.
13 Eugen Fodor, Spanien und Portugal, mit Balearen und Kanarischen Inseln (Cologne: Comel, 1952), 45.
14 See Antonio Gómez Montejano, Las doce en punto y sereno: historias, avatares y anécdotas de los serenos de Madrid (Madrid: La Librería, 1997).
15 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country – revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 28.
16 See Alicia Fuentes Vega, “Entre rascacielos y mendigos: el espacio urbano en el imaginario turístico de lo español durante la dictadura,” in Los lugares del arte: Identidad y representación, vol II, ed. Sofía Diéguez Patao (Barcelona: Laertes, 2014) 175–198.
17 Morton, A Stranger in Spain, 17.
18 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 18–19.
19 Ibid., 389.
20 Ibid., 397.
21 Emma Waterton & Steve Watson, “Introduction: a Visual Heritage,” in Culture, Heritage and Representation, 1–16.
22 Dean MacCannell, The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class (London: Macmillan, 1976).
23 See Bo Strath, “Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity: the Conceptualization of Past and Future in Swedish Social Sciences since the 1870s,” in ‘Regimes of Historicity’ in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890–1945, eds. Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsény, and Marja Jalava (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 233–253.
24 Hasso Spode, “‘Reif für die Insel’: Prolegomena zu einer historische Anthropologie des Tourismus,” in Arbeit, Freizeit, Reisen: die feinen Unterschiede im Alltag. Beiträge zur Volkskultur in Nordwestdeutschland, ed. Christiane Cantauw (Münster: Waxmann, 1995), 105–123.
25 See Wolfgang Knöbel, “Southern Europe and the Master Narratives of ‘Modernization’ and ‘Modernity’,” in Southern Europe? Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece from the 1950s until the present day, eds. Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2015), 173–199.
26 Alicia Fuentes Vega, Bienvenido, Mr. Turismo. Cultura visual del boom en España (Madrid: Cátedra, 2017).
27 David Picard and Michael A. Di Giovine, “Introduction: Through Other Worlds,” in Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference (Bristol/Buffalo/Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2014), 1–30.
28 Eugenia Afinoguénova, “Lo moderno y lo primitivo del desarrollismo turístico español,” in Un hispanismo para el siglo XXI: ensayos de crítica cultural, eds. Rosalía Cornejo Parriego and Alberto Villamandos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 159–181.
29 Morton, A Stranger in Spain, 18.
30 Der Tourist. Deutsch-spanische Zeitschrift, nº 5 (20.10.1954), 4.
31 Salter, Introducing Spain, 57.
32 See Nigel Glendinning, Goya y sus críticos (Madrid: Taurus, 1982).
33 Roger Bartra, El mito del salvaje (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 434–435.
34 Ibid., 432.
35 Honor Tracy, Silk Hats and No Breakfast: Notes on a Spanish Journey (New York: Random House, 1958), 39.
36 See Isabel Hernández, “‘Volvemos a Europa’. La España ‘a primera vista’ de un suizo universal,” in ‘El Sur también existe’. Hacia la creación de un imaginario europeo sobre España, eds. Berta Raposo and Ferran Robles (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2014), 87–108.
37 As quoted in ibid., 92.
38 John Haycraft, Babel en España (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2007 [1st 1958]), 77.
39 Eveline Dürr and Rivke Jaffe, “Theorizing Slum Tourism: Performing, Negotiating and Transforming Inequality,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 93 (2012), 113–123.
40 Helmut Goettl, “Das andere Land und ich,” Tendenzen, 44 (München: Heino F. von Damnitz, 1967), 71–78.
41 Ibid., 71.
42 On Francoist policies regarding the visualization of poverty, see Mar Alberruche, “Fotografía de la pobreza y la marginalidad en la España franquista,” Trasatlántica. Encuentro de críticos e ivestigadores de Artes Visuales (Ciudad de México: PhotoEspaña, 2010).
43 Nelson Graburn and Noel B. Salazar (eds.), “Introduction. Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries,” in Tourism Imaginaries. Anthropological Approaches (New York/Oxford: Berghahn 2014), 1–28.
44 Ingrid Thurner, “Die Rezeption des Fremden in der touristischen Fotografie,” in Konsequenzen des Tourismus: ein Reader mit Beispielen aus Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern, eds. Nicole Häusler and Klaus Rieländer (Göttingen: Arbeitskreis für Internationale Wissenschaftskommunikation, 1995), 55–62.
45 Morton, A Stranger in Spain, 54.
46 See Javier Portús et al., Niños de Murillo (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2001).
47 Bert Boger and Anton Dieterich, Portrait of Spain (Edinburgh/London: Oliver and Boyd, 1958 [1st Stuttgart, 1955]), 84.
48 Tracy, Silk Hats and…, 13.
49 Walther L. Bernecker, “La visión de España desde Alemania: un panorama diacrónico,” in ‘El Sur también existe’…, eds. Raposo and Robles, 13–48.
50 See Patricia Hertel, “Manifold Discourses. Mapping the South in Contemporary European History,” and Guido Franzinetti, “Southern Europe and International Politics in the Post-War Period,” both in Southern Europe?…, eds. Baumeister and Sala, 201–217 and 221–233.
51 Roberto M. Dainotto, “A South with a View. Europe and Its Other,” Neplanta: Views from South, 1, no. 2 (2000): 375–390.
52 See Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America.
53 See e.g. Javier Tusell Gómez, La España de Franco. El poder, la oposición y la política exterior durante el franquismo (Madrid: Alba Libros, 2005).