A chamber of horrors: Spanish art and its enemies

This article traces connections between reviews of Spanish art in Britain between the 18th and the 21st centuries and the public pre-judices that seem to have remained constant. Beginning with the famous London exhibition of 2009, The Sacred Made Real, the article addresses the origins of the language of reviewers, from the late 17th century to the Age of Enlightenment; to 19th-century debates about Catholic art, and the dislike of waxworks, effigies, and polychrome sculpture. Reviews and critical writings about Spain and its art are often linked by the same exaggerated rhetorical hyperbole with regard to the raw realism of some Roman Catholic imagery from the 16th century onward. Attempts to promote the art in Britain have met with unexpected results. The growing popularity of Spanish artists such as Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Salvador Dali exercised a long artistic influence in the 20th century. This article suggests that the “enemies” of Spanish art did as much to promote the artistic value of Spain as did its admirers. Reactions and criticisms to Spanish art from the British, which spawned hostility or indifference among Protestant writers, from John Ruskin to Philip Hamerton, were also to create a whole new creative endeavor at the end of the 20th century. Anger, anxiety, and transgression became new artistic promptings and it is here that links to British Surrealism appear. The figure of an artist from the past as a purveyor of horror, whose work summoned up associations with death, deformity, and violence, came to characterize the art shown at the 2009 exhibition in 21st-century London. Works of such importance and influence were also to become unclassifiable but were also broached as a source of new artistic inspiration.