Spain

B

Art and Architecture

Through the centuries some of the world’s greatest painters have lived and worked in Spain. The first was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who was born on Crete and is better known as El Greco. His portraits, most notably of saints, are characterized by eerily elongated features and a dramatic use of light that also lends great power to his landscapes. Among his best-known works are View of Toledo (about 1610, Metropolitan Museum, New York) and The Burial of Count Orgaz (1586; Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain).

The 17th-century painter Diego Velázquez was another master in the use of light. His technical virtuosity places him among the most influential painters of all time. Velázquez is best-known for the works he painted at the Spanish royal court, such as Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656, Prado, Madrid, Spain). However, he also produced many memorable paintings of more humble subjects, such as The Waterseller of Seville (Wellington Museum, London, England).

The painter Francisco Goya was best-known for his realism and his portraiture, evident in his sometimes scathing portraits of the Spanish royal family. Goya’s realism is most evident, however, in his depictions of violence, such as The Third of May, 1808 (1814, Prado Museum, Madrid), which shows Spanish civilians being shot by soldiers from the armies of Napoleon I. As Goya became increasingly bitter and disillusioned later in life, his themes became more grotesque, as in his etchings of war scenes and paintings of mythological subjects such as Saturn Devouring One of His Sons (1821-1823, Prado).

Pablo Picasso was probably the greatest figure of modern art. His 1907 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is considered to mark the birth of cubism. Although Picasso spent most of his creative life outside Spain, he remained intensely Spanish. His masterwork Guernica (1937), a massive canvas depicting the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, was bequeathed to his homeland on his death and now hangs in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The two other leading Spanish painters of the 20th century were Salvador Dalí, whose surrealist images are widely reproduced, and Joan Miró, whose style developed from surrealism into a uniquely playful form of abstraction.

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Historically, the most distinctively Spanish style of architecture was the 16th-century plateresque. It is characterized by delicate and elegant ornamentation on the exterior of buildings that echoed the work of silversmiths. Modernism, which emerged around 1900, was essentially a Catalan movement. Its emphasis on organic shapes and intricate patterns combined features of art nouveau, a movement of that time, and Moorish architecture from southern Spain that dated back to the Middle Ages. Modernism’s greatest exponent in Spain was Antoni Gaudí, whose unfinished masterwork, Church of the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) in Barcelona, was finally nearing completion in the early 2000s. Spanish architects who have more recently acquired international standing include Ricardo Bofill and Santiago Calatrava.

C

Theater and Film

The classics of Spanish theater are products of the Golden Age, between about 1550 and 1650, and are associated above all with the dramatists Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón, and Tirso de Molina. Not until the 1920s did Spain produce another playwright of similar stature: García Lorca. His works, such as The House of Bernarda Alba and Yerma, combine lyricism with the stark portrayal of personal tragedy. Lorca was also prominent in efforts to bring theater to the rural masses.

Under the Franco dictatorship, censorship imposed strict limits on theatrical creativity. Nonetheless, dramatists such as Antonio Buero Vallejo were able to produce reflections on Spanish society and the Franco regime. The removal of censorship after Franco’s death in 1975, along with the creation of new regional governments, produced a surge in independent and alternative theater, especially in Catalonia.

Motion pictures have enjoyed great popularity in Spain since their beginning. One of Spain’s greatest film directors, Luis Buñuel, made his greatest films outside Spain, which he left after the Spanish Civil War. They include The Exterminating Angel (1962); Belle de jour (1967); and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). A number of talented Spanish directors emerged in the late 20th century. Chief among them was Pedro Almodóvar, whose dark take on the screwball comedy in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Kika (1994) has brought him international popularity.

D

Music and Dance

Spanish music has a long tradition as well as a vitality and distinctiveness that reflect a blend of European and Arabic influences. Yet Spain produced no major composers until the 20th century, perhaps because the country’s most typical instrument remained the guitar. The first Spanish composers to achieve international acclaim were Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz, both of whom used popular and regional themes as the basis of much of their music. They were followed by Manuel de Falla, whose work, while also distinctively Spanish and relatively limited in quantity, displays a capacity for successful innovation that marks him as Spain’s finest composer. Similarly influenced by Spanish traditional music was Joaquín Rodrigo, who composed a wide repertoire of ballet and orchestral works. His Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) for guitar is one of the most widely played modern classics. The two outstanding Spanish classical performers of the 20th century were guitarist Andrés Segovia and cellist Pablo Casals.

Spain’s contribution to opera has been almost exclusively on the performing side, but there it has been considerable. In particular, soprano Montserrat Caballé and tenor Plácido Domingo have stood at the very top of their profession for many years, while tenor José Carreras ranks close behind. The country boasts its own form of light opera, known as zarzuela, as well as a unique combination of guitar music, song, and dance known as flamenco. Flamenco has a distinctive, half-broken rhythm, which in traditional forms sticks to a limited number of patterns. In recent years, however, “new flamenco” has been influenced by other styles such as jazz, blues, and salsa. Guitarist Paco de Lucía, already a virtuoso in the traditional style, has been at the forefront of these developments. At the same time, flamenco is a major influence on contemporary Spanish popular music. See also Spanish Dance.

E

Libraries and Museums

The National Library in Madrid, founded in 1712 as the Royal Library, is the largest in Spain. Rare books, maps, prints, and the magnificent Sala de Cervantes, devoted to the writings of the great Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, are among the special collections of the library. The Library of the Royal Palace (1760) in Madrid has many rare editions from the 16th century as well as fine collections of manuscripts, engravings, and music. One of the most complete libraries in Spain is the Complutense University of Madrid Library, which was founded in 1341. The Escorial Library near Madrid is known for its collection of rare books. The Archives and Library of the Cathedral Chapter in Toledo is famous for its collection of manuscripts from the 8th and 9th centuries and documents of the 11th century.

One of the world’s greatest art collections is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The collection is particularly rich in works by El Greco; by Spanish painters Velázquez, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Goya; by Italian painters Sandro Botticelli and Titian; by Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Hieronymus Bosch; and by Dutch painter Rembrandt. The Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid is Spain’s national museum of modern art, which opened in 1990. Its collection focuses on works by the leading figures of 20th-century Spanish art, above all the painters Dalí, Miró, and Picasso, whose masterwork Guernica is its greatest single attraction. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which opened in 1992, contains one of the world’s foremost private collections. It complements the collections of the Prado and Reina Sofía and is especially strong in the areas of impressionism and German expressionism. The best-known Spanish museum outside Madrid is the Guggenheim in Bilbao, famous above all for its titanium-clad design by American architect Frank Gehry. Another modern art museum, the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, is located in Valencia. Dalí’s former home is now a popular museum in the Catalan town of Figueres.

Spanish pottery, brocades, tapestries, and ivory carvings are in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, which houses also the most notable library on archaeology in the country. The National Ethnological Museum in Madrid contains objects from former Spanish possessions, including Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines, and Bolivia. Other museums in Madrid include the Natural Science Museum and the National Museum of Reproductions of Works of Art. Situated in Barcelona are the Maritime Museum and the Archaeological Museum, which has a large collection of prehistoric, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Visigothic art.

V

Economy of Spain

The Spanish economy has changed dramatically since the 1950s. By the year 2000 Spain had the world’s seventh largest gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of all the goods and services a country produces. However, as late as the 1950s the United Nations classified Spain as a developing country. Spain industrialized late, and only partially, so that until the 1960s the country’s industry was confined almost entirely to the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Bilbao. With the exception of Madrid, which remained primarily an administrative center, virtually all the rest of the country lived from primary economic activities—mainly agriculture but also fishing and mining.

When wider industrialization finally took place in Spain, it did so under an authoritarian regime—an occurrence unique in the Western world. As a result industrialization was based on special circumstances, in particular the existence of a cowed labor force and massive government protection against competition from imports. Many of Spain’s industries belonged to the public sector. This approach produced a considerable boom in the decade from 1962 to 1972. But it came to an abrupt halt with a jump in petroleum prices in 1973 and the end of the Franco dictatorship two years later. One consequence was that industry never came to dominate the Spanish economy. No sooner had manufacturing overtaken agriculture in the early 1970s than it, in turn, was surpassed by services.

Spain’s next major advance came in the 1980s. Entry to the European Community in 1986, preceded by a program of industrial restructuring (reconversión), led to a second period of rapid growth at the end of the 1980s. This growth was fueled largely by public spending on infrastructure and services, and by internal investment. Thereafter, Spain was particularly hard hit by an economic slump in the early 1990s, but it also recovered particularly strongly. In 1997, against most expectations, it qualified for entry to European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the single currency and single monetary authority in the European Union (EU). Subsequently, Spain experienced a third boom, with economic growth rates among the world’s highest. It weathered the economic downturn of the early 2000s rather better than most European economies.

After 20 years of EU membership, Spain’s per capita GDP reached nearly 90 percent of the European Union average. The gross domestic product in 2007 was $1,436.9 billion. The national budget in 2007 included revenues of $399.5 billion and expenditures of $360.5 billion. The economy today has become fairly typical of a developed country, dominated by the service sector and with well under 10 percent of the workers employed in agriculture. Spain’s participation in the global economy has also grown and by the early 2000s came to include significant investment abroad, principally in Latin America. Spain continues to depend on imported energy, and it has a rather strictly regulated labor market with an accompanying high level of unemployment.

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