Painting, Popular Culture, Putrefaction: Depicting Tradition on the Eve of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on painterly explorations of tradition, modernity that supposedly opposed it, and the putrefaction and decay inherent in each cultural pole, during the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War. These themes are manifest in the work of José Gutiérrez Solana (1886 – 1945), Maruja Mallo (1902 – 1995) and Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989), all active as painters in Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century. Although each came from provinces wherein regional identities were strongly asserted, their artistic output does not betray evidence of a particular interest in exploring these aspects of locality. Rather these artists, also all accomplished writers, were drawn toward the complex realities of everyday historical existence as they played out more generally in a Spanish context. They refused promotion of the stereotypical cultural elements of Spanish folklore just as they were suspicious of modernity and the supposed infrastructural and social improvements it involved. Solana, a member of the old guard of painting, celebrated by Madrid’s avant-garde circles, looks at Spain and sees and paints decay. His treatment of the theme in a sustained pictorial language is so recognizable that it engendered its own adjective: solanesco. Mallo and Dali, committed modernists, celebrate the diverse offerings of the machine age, which would seem to place them a world apart from the older artist. Moreover, in their paintings the younger artists, friends during their student years, were known for the application of an ever-changing panoply of figurative styles, further differentiating their work from Solana’s. Yet like Solana they recognized elements of decay and putrefaction within their environs, and their plastic considerations of these themes took on a decidedly solanesco character. This dissertation brings the paintings and writings of these artists into a productive conversation revealing not only shared attitudes concerning tradition in Spain during the first decades of the 20th century, but also allowing for a reframing of their work. I consider Solana’s oeuvre not as representative of the end of particular tradition of Spanish genre painting, but as a stimulus for avant-gardists Mallo and Dalí, usually discussed within the context of Surrealism.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133504/1/amwieck_1.pd