Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE PERSISTENCE OF MYTH

2020; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17540763.2019.1697962

1754-0771

Ramón Esparza,

Historical Art and Architecture Studies

This paper analyses the impact of the myth of España Negra on Spanish identity and culture from the country’s crushing defeat in the Spanish-American War to the present. Spain’s loss of Cuba and the Philippines (the last remnants of its once-global empire) to the United States in 1898 gave rise to a profound national crisis and provided a catalyst for a new wave of writers, artists and intellectuals known collectively as the Generation of ’98, a movement that focused on the motives for the debacle and sought the “essence” of Spain in the sobriety of the Castilian landscape and regional customs. Conservative authors of that period such as Azorin and painters such as Ignacio Zuloaga and José Gutiérrez Solana propagated a troubling, dark vision of Spain that remained unquestioned during the Franco dictatorship and has been repeatedly revived by new generations of Spanish writers, visual artists and movie directors. The España Negra myth has had a particularly strong impact on Spanish photographers, many of who have focused on archetypes and endeavoured to create a visual record of a vanishing national heritage. José Ortiz Echagüe, whose work is examined in depth in this text, served as a reference for most Spanish photographers until the end of the 1970s in terms of both style (an outdated form of pictorialism) and subjects (landscape, country and heritage viewed from an urban perspective). The notion of España Negra has evolved and waned over time. Photographers lost interest in the topic following Franco’s death and the end of his decades-long dictatorship and looked increasingly to Europe for inspiration. This paper analyses how new generations of image-makers working in radically different circumstances have ideologically and aesthetically distanced themselves from outmoded perceptions of Spain as an irredeemably backward and underdeveloped society.