Jordana Mendelson Sample Chapter

Documenting Spain:
Artists, Exhibition Culture,
and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939

by Jordana Mendelson

Introduction

Documentary reached a peak during the late 1920s to late 1930s in Spain. In 1931, an article in the Catalan literary magazine Mirador put the situation into perspective: “Neither the word document nor that which it expresses are new, for sure, but never as right now have we heard it spoken of so frequently.” Made and displayed with the latest representational technologies (photography, film, and large-scale exhibitions), documentary images, especially in mass media, became a symbol in Spain of modernity. By using documentary style in their work, Spanish artists and writers connected their depictions of local issues to international trends in the visual arts. Documents, made using a documentary style and others that were seen to be innocent of intentionality, were also, at the same time, synonymous with tradition, time capsules of history. During the early twentieth century, taking stock of heritage played an instrumental role in public policy and reform in Spain. Individuals and state agencies perceived photographic and cinematic documents as the building blocks of collective memory. The widespread dialogue about visual documents was linked to larger debates about the production and conservation of patrimony. In the Spanish state, where the question of national identities, especially Catalan, Basque, and Castilian, played a critical role in establishing and contesting political and social practice, documentary took on added importance in providing evidence for cultural, linguistic, and geographic differences and/or similarities.

Editorials written by the directors of prominent newspapers and manifestos penned by Spain’s leading artist-provocateurs joined with numerous other anonymous and signed texts to create a dialogue in the press about the production, distribution, and reutilization of documentary images. In 1930, for example, the Barcelona newspaper La Publicitat featured an article by its director, historian and politician Nicolau d’Olwer, in which he observed that documents were neither necessarily authentic nor truthful. For him, the introduction of photography offered no better assurances, because the photographic laboratory allowed for all kinds of hoaxes and manipulations. He concluded that the problem for history was how documents should be evaluated, even more than whether or not something should be documented. D’Olwer suggested that the rigorous evaluation of documents should be based on a comparative system that relied on information both within and outside the visual field. In short, for d’Olwer no document existed independently of its social, political, and cultural context. In Valencia’s La Semana Gráficaone year later, Francisco Caravaca countered: “Documents are faithful data, tradition written from past facts, . . . a truthful text that at every moment should constitute an extremely valuable auxiliary for historical reconstruction.” Caravaca pleaded with his readers to see film as a particularly useful tool for capturing and conserving the historical record: “Doesn’t the reader believe that it would be interesting for governments to create film archives . . . ?” He understood the document to hold an inherent truth in its ability to witness history objectively: “An archive of this kind would eliminate in the future many doubts, those great doubts that have brought about famous controversies between nations.” In Caravaca’s depository, history is easily retrieved and recreated.

While d’Olwer and Caravaca debated the authenticity of the consciously created or conserved document and its ability to accurately represent the world, other critics attended to the document’s more subjective characteristics. In 1932, an unsigned editorial in La Publicitat opined: “The document is not produced, it is found. The art of the document is an art of intuition, a glance.” This evaluation is striking. It gives the status of the document over to the observer, who happens on it without intention but has the power to turn the object or representation into something that others will consider authentic. Joan Sacs, a leading critic of modern art, reacted negatively to this aspect of the document’s subjectivity. In an article written for Mirador, Sacs argued that documentary style was as difficult to understand as the most radical innovations in modern art, and just as elitist. He complained, “Artists and amateurs of avant-garde art, dadaists, superrealists, subidealists and autorealists, are precisely those men . . . most enthusiastic about documentary film and photography, [even though] ordinary people detest [these] films and photographs because they do not understand them.”

Contrary to Sacs’s assertion, the sheer quantity of documentary photographs and newsreels produced and distributed in Spain during this period indicates that a significant number of ordinary readers and viewers were in contact with these images on a regular basis. Documentary became a kind of social and artistic equalizer, a form of representation shared by the avant-garde and the masses. As cohabitants of the modern world, both elite and nonelite viewers alike were drawn to the immediacy that documentary offered. Molly Nesbit has observed that “avant-garde photographers built their photographs out of the most common of formal materials, the document, and did so because they needed to keep up with its modernity, to criticize it and to surpass it.” Whether or not, and how, the Spanish avant-garde may have criticized and surpassed the common life of the document, especially its institutional and commercialized forms, is a critical question that needs to be explored in order to understand the role of mass media in Spain during the 1930s.

One key to explaining the popularity of documentaries is to return to the editorial that opened this Introduction. Probably written by Joan Cortès, the article explores the possible reasons for the widespread embrace of documentary film. Why, despite busy days and the crushing demands of modern life, were Catalans sitting through entire sessions of documentaries at their local theaters? According to Cortès, moviegoers were drawn to the appeal of the exotic, which he illustrated in the article with a photograph from a documentary film about Africa (fig. 1.). His choice of image is important; it brings together complex issues of representation, technology, and imperialism that haunted the discourse on documentaries throughout this period. In Spain, the relationship between modernity and colonialism was especially complex, and it was tied to the nation’s colonial defeats as well as its long-standing reputation as Europe’s Other from within. For many, Spain’s relationship with Africa was what differentiated Spain from the rest of Europe. For Spanish artists and intellectuals, the historical connections with Africa reached deep into the nation’s cultural, linguistic, and artistic heritage, causing both fascination and denial. In 1898, Spain had lost her colonies in Cuba and the Philippines after defeat in the Spanish-American War. In the early twentieth century, the government launched a military campaign in Morocco that resulted in the occupation of the northern part of the country by Spain until 1956. While establishing a presence in Africa ensured that Spain would maintain its reputation as an imperial power, the “disaster” of 1898, and the unrest caused by the war in Morocco, fueled debates about the attitude Spain should take toward modernity and the rest of Europe. In the arenas of politics, literature, and the arts, these colonial crises still resonated in the ideas and images of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, documentary films and photographs of the Other in Spain were fraught with implications about the self and the nation.

Overdetermined meanings, like those carried by this one photograph, are typical of the way documentary functioned during the 1930s. Visual and textual documents were never simply records, but screens onto which individuals projected their desires, fears, and identities. The exotic, whether located outside the nation’s borders, in the countryside, or in the marginal zones of the city, was made accessible through mass media like film and photography. What caught the attention of the general public and artists alike was that, for all its ideological complexity, the document was seen to be stylistically simple and objective. As Cortès asserted, documentary allowed viewers to “see everything with their own eyes, with a minimum of cost and a minimum of discomfort. . . . [Viewers] would much prefer the authentic document, even if it was poorly composed, to all of the deluxe idiocy of a cinematic operetta.”

The diversity of positions taken by Spain’s writers indicates a fundamental aspect of the modern document. Documentary images were enlisted by institutions for the authentication of history and embraced by the avant-garde as a challenge to these same institutional claims. This book takes the document’s paradox as a central problem in the history of modernity, one that fundamentally shifted the terms of the modern from artistic autonomy and rebellion to relationships and potential dissidence. When reexamined in light of the document’s paradox, Spain, which has conventionally been understood as an exception to the forward march of modernity, proves itself to be at the forefront of modernist debates on the politics of form. It is in Spain, perhaps more than any other country, where the discourse on documents shaped the relationships that artists and intellectuals established between national realities and modern ambitions. Unlike other national contexts where the terms document and documentary may have been differentiated—document being a generic term, while documentary was ascribed to a particular mode of writing and image making —in Spain, documento and documental were used almost interchangeably among artists and critics.

The form and subject matter of documentary during this period cannot be separated from concurrent debates in the arts, literature, social science, and political theory. Spain was driven by its largely rural economy well into the twentieth century. The everyman, who visited his local theater to watch documentaries, and the politician, who reviewed official publications of government projects with photographic illustrations, shared a bank of images that were created by artists from the cities of rural inhabitants for readers and viewers in both the city and the countryside. Documentary became the visual means through which connections were forged between the center and the periphery, both within and outside of the nation’s borders. During these encounters, those from the cities introduced the most advanced technologies in mechanical reproduction (photography, film, and the phonograph) to rural inhabitants, while using these same devices to record the Spain’s traditions, customs, and dress. As a result, the encounter itself became a recurring motif. How these moments of contact were framed, and the conditions that generated them, are central to interpreting the role that documents played in shaping public policy and artists’ projects.

Art History, Documentary, and Spanish Modernity

The history of European modernism crafted and repeated by critics and historians has attempted to secure an interpretation of the avant-garde that emphasizes artistic progress and downplays the heterogeneity of artists’ responses to technological innovation, national identity, and ideology. In the case of Spain’s artists, and many others, such an interpretation does not hold. Taking documentary images as instances of the potentially hybrid state of European modernity enables this study of Spain to provide a model for important insights into the ways in which the mass media and their relationship to the shifting social and political realities of producers and subjects were not on the margins of modernity but at its center. Documentary as a practice was not limited to one national context or even to one type of artist or institution. In the Netherlands, documentary gained status as one means by which artists could bridge their political beliefs with progressive artistic practice. Joris Ivens’s Film Liga in Amsterdam strove to do this by creating a collective that responded to social issues with formally innovative nonfiction films. French film makers like Jean Painlevé attracted the attention of Europe’s cutting-edge visual artists with his underwater scientific films of marine life. Other artists appropriated photographs from the illustrated press to articulate a more strident critical position with respect to the mass consumption of documentary images. German dada artist Hannah Höch raided newspapers like the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung to make collages that reflected on the status of women, politics, and difference in Weimar Germany. Surrealists found in the document the means to undo realism (and science) while wearing its guises. In every case, documentary created a visual territory shared, albeit tensely, by the avant-garde and the cultural institutions of modernity.

By the 1930s, what had begun as an experimental form of representation practiced by the few was now in the foreground of everyday life. Governments, private companies, and the public were trained in creating and recognizing the characteristics of documentary. Documentary became an international visual currency that crossed national, political, and artistic boundaries; it was the preferred style of the socialist realists supported by Stalin in the Soviet Union, the photographers working for the Farm Security Administration in the United States, and politically committed artists sympathetic to the Popular Front in France. In each of these national cases we find, as in Spain, that artists who held diverse views on the relationship of photography and film to the fine arts helped to forge (either coercively or creatively) a representative style for national issues that became identified with group politics. In some cases, individual photographers’ identities and styles were maintained, but often single works were associated with larger documentary programs. Authorship was valued less than the message an image communicated. Both government and commercial agencies funded the production of visual archives that were introduced to the public through the illustrated press, film houses, and public exhibition. Thus, no matter what each photographer’s purpose may have been, the making of documentary images was a practice shared by the avant-garde, agencies of power, and industry.

Spain’s artists were aware of the complex issues that documentary engendered internationally, and they applied these new visual strategies to critically represent local concerns. Like their European counterparts, they were vigorously engaged with various media in exploring issues of authorship, politics, and identity. As a representational style, documentary was practiced by artists directly involved in film and photography as well as artists working in related fields who used the technique as a constructive and critical tool. The ability of documentary to be taken up by nonprofessionals, whether they be trained artists or amateurs, complicates notions of specificity that have dominated interpretations of the authors, media, styles, and genres associated with academic accounts of modern European art. In Spain, professional artists and amateurs equally contributed to the production of documentary during the 1930s, and their work was often placed side by side in the context of broader social and political issues.

Travel was a key component in the development and proliferation of documentary as an aspect of modern artistic practice in Spain. Like many artists who moved among Paris, New York, and other locations, Spanish artists created well-worn paths between cities like Madrid and Barcelona and the places in which they lived and developed their careers as artists in the rest of Europe. Many professional and amateur Spanish artists were able to spend at least a sojourn abroad. They benefited from relationships with artists, architects, and writers in France, Germany, Italy, and other European and American countries. For those who were unable to leave Spain, connections to the latest trends in art and culture were forged through subscriptions to and participation in literary and illustrated magazines. To explore the production and exhibition of documentary in Spain is to understand this important dialogue. The images and ideas that came out of these exchanges are rich in interpretive possibilities. In the case of documentary, the traces of points of contact and contrast are visible both in the images and in their surrounding discourse.

Spain’s artists continually negotiated personal and national boundaries, and yet for the purpose of defining a national style or an artistic movement they have been identified as either essentially Spanish or not Spanish at all. A dark palette, grotesque subject matter, and painterly (or cinematic) bravura have been seen as national traits that link such artists as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel to one another and to their predecessors. By recovering stylistic and/or iconographic references to the work of El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Jusepe Ribera, and Francisco Goya, historians have grounded Spain’s modern artists in their nation’s art historical past. But artists like Dalí and Buñuel were also actively engaged with the present. The relationships they established with the past were mediated by the contemporary efforts of Spanish intellectuals, politicians, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to make “invented traditions” appear natural. It is with this national project that modern Spanish artists were concerned. Unfortunately, most scholars have continued to deemphasize the involvement of Spain’s artists with these debates, choosing instead to foster interpretations that place Dalí and Buñuel firmly within narratives of artistic practice in France or in the Americas. Because the history of European modernism has favored Paris as the location of strident creativity and has singled out artists like Picasso, Miró, and, to some extent, Dalí as exemplars of modern European art, the life and work of these artists has been associated with overarching narratives about modernism that place priority on France as an epicenter of artistic innovation and patronage.

Spain’s artists and intellectuals actively participated in the creation and theorization of European modernism by understanding documentary as a central idea in the development of modern art and national culture. Instead of a tale about the exploits of a few Spanish artists who were able to break out of the national trap and make it on the international scene, this book is about the relationships established between artists and institutions at a critical moment in the history of Spanish modernity. In reconstructing this history, I focus on artists who participated in and/or maintained a lively, critical stance toward Spain’s documentary turn during the late 1920s and 1930s. Thus, Dalí and Buñuel figure prominently in this book, as well as other Spanish artists who, despite their contributions, are infrequently mentioned in English language histories. Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró are not major protagonists in this story. Both created works that connect with national traditions, folklore, and the artistic representation of personal and collective identities; each also engaged with mass media in their work. However, neither Picasso nor Miró took the idea or practice of documentary as a primary motivation during this period. I have refrained from writing an overview of the representation of landscape or rural types in Spanish art. Such a project, though important, would not address the embrace of mass media, nor would it address the reasons for its shared use by avant-garde artists and government institutions during the 1930s. My intention is to demonstrate the important yet problematic role of advanced strategies of mechanical reproduction in the realization of what may be considered a collective archive of national images.

Turning to what were technically advanced modes of mechanical reproduction and display, artists and agencies often made the unexpected decision to use photography, film, and mass spectacle to create images of national culture that were potentially antiurban and antimodern. Generated by artists and writers working in the cities who were taking as their subject images and identities located outside the metropolis, visual trajectories were charted between the city and the countryside. How did the use of documentary reinforce or challenge these directions of impact and influence? What role did the specific conditions of production and reception play in determining whether these documents were seen as contributing to or deconstructing national politics? What formal strategies were combined with documentary to position it on one side of this divide or another? If taken as part of an international trend, how do we account for the particularities of each work and for the specific national debates that fostered its production?

One goal of this book is to consider how dissidence may or may not have worked for artists using documentary in 1930s Spain. When looking at documentary style, in which subject matter is treated both by the avant-garde and by government institutions, is it possible (and useful) to identify if (and where) criticality is located? Did Spain’s artists and writers articulate an avant-garde position with respect to documentary whereby both the material support for and the style of documentary worked in radical or transformative ways? I argue that documentary images did have the potential to introduce countercurrents. The artists who supported documentary as an antiart believed that the advanced techniques associated with mechanical reproduction offered an opportunity to overturn long-standing images of traditional culture. Framing and juxtaposition are two visual strategies used by artists to transform the meanings of documentary images of national subjects, and both were widely used in Spain during the 1920s and 1930s. However, even when these appropriated images were employed and published in the press, another question arises: How do we gauge the public’s ability to recognize the artist’s purpose in staging the document in such a way?

The terms avant-garde and institution are used in this study to mark differences in purpose, in conditions of production, and in ranges of reception. At the same time, my aim is to destabilize the notion that either term was solidly fixed during the 1930s in Spain. After all, the trajectory of documentary images demonstrates that these terms must be used with caution. The function of these terms, and what they represented, is dependent on issues of context. The fact that Spain’s institutions and its avant-garde developed in ways that have led to the nation’s designation as “different,” “marginal,” or “underdeveloped” in studies on European modernism indicates that when writing about Spain attention must be paid to the changing definitions of these terms and their relationship to each other. Rather than constantly comparing Spain’s circumstances to concurrent activities taking place in Europe or the Americas, my aim is to show what modernity may have looked like and how it operated during the 1930s through interrelating case studies. Only then, I believe, will the differences that may have existed between Spain and the rest of Europe be grounded in the historically specific study of visual and exhibition culture.

The Politics of Documentary in Spain

The chronology of Spanish modernity and its contours are different from the rest of Europe during the early twentieth century. Spain did not participate in either World War I or World War II. As a neutral country, Spain’s story is often marginalized from the grand narratives that explain the logic of cultural modernism between the wars. However, Spain suffered its own political crises that, when combined with the surrounding European conflicts, made of the 1930s in Spain one of the most violent and politically turbulent periods in the nation’s history. The rise of fascism, the spread of communism, and the economic impact of the Depression were all felt in Spain. During the course of a decade, Spain experienced the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30), the fall of the monarchy, the declaration of the Second Republic (1931), and a Civil War that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Unique in the ways that these political events related to Spain’s history of colonialism, Catholicism, and industrial development, they nevertheless place Spain firmly within the conditions and conflicts of modernization.

During the first two years of the Second Republic (1931–33), a liberal, reformist government run by Socialists and Republicans attempted to make significant changes to the traditional influence of the church, the aristocracy, and the military over education, agriculture, and the distribution of power among the nation’s people. In reaction to these reforms and in defense of Nationalist ideologies, the Socialists were defeated in the 1933 elections. The Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) won the election by forming a nationwide party in support of Catholicism and traditionalist values. In October 1934, strikes broke out across Spain with uprisings in Catalonia and Asturias. The violence the government used to put down the strikes was fierce. Many died or were imprisoned. The repression associated with the Republic during 1933–36 has given this period the title “bienio negro” (dark biennium). Many of the reforms that were initiated during the first biennium were curtailed or reversed. In February 1936, the Popular Front, a leftist coalition, won the election. However, in July a military uprising led by General Francisco Franco spread from Morocco to Spain and led to the outbreak of the Civil War. During the war, artists, like everyone else, were forced to choose sides, between the Insurgents, who supported Franco in his revolt against the Republic, or the Loyalists. In the zones controlled by the government, a social revolution that led to the collectivization of industry and agriculture took place. Seeing Spain as a staging ground for world politics, the international community paid attention to the Civil War and took sides as well. Franco received the support of the Germans and the Italians, while the Republic was aided by the Soviet Union. A decade that had begun with the fall of a dictatorship ended with the rise of another. In April 1939 the Republican armies surrendered to Franco, who stayed in power until his death in 1975.

These political markers divide the decade into moments of greater or lesser political crisis, but they are only part of what defined the cultural landscape in 1930s Spain. Within Spain, semi-autonomous communities, or regions, developed a national identity that was often in conflict with the centrist ideology of the state, whose political power was physically and ideologically located in Madrid. The capital of Catalonia, Barcelona, had long been one of Spain’s most important industrial centers. The Catalan language and culture, it was argued, provided the evidence for the region’s separateness from the rest of Spain. In Bilbao, there was also movement to define the Basque Country as different from Castile in its language, geography, and culture. Throughout Spain, research into the history of the nation became an investigation into difference. Whereas the Madrid-based government wanted to unify Spain under the umbrella of the Castilian language (and to support that unification with a strong aristocracy, military, and church), in Barcelona and elsewhere there was a greater emphasis by some local politicians on the potential of decentralization to modernize the nation. The languages of Castelano, Català, Euskera, Gallego, and Valencià were adopted by many artists, writers, and politicians to articulate their identification with a particular nationalism instead of with the political agenda of the Spanish Nationalists. The political philosophies of these competing nationalisms were written by intellectuals living in Spain’s most modern and industrialized cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao). Yet, their subjects were the nation’s rural inhabitants. It was out in the countryside, in the landscape, and within ancient traditions that modern Spaniards went looking for answers to their contemporary political crises.

Case Studies

In order to untangle the cross-references that existed within documentary practice during this period, the chapters in this book are organized in roughly chronological order. Each chapter centers on an individual or work and moves outward from there to consider the dynamic interplay that existed between single artists and a larger community of artists and images. Some repetition is inevitable as photographs, films, and their authors moved amid a world of changing locations, publications, and positions that at times overlapped, intersected, and repeated earlier documentary episodes. In their focus on the people, land, and customs of the worlds they depicted, both independent and government-sponsored photographers and film makers connected their work with the disciplines of anthropology and geography. Through documentary, social science research joined forces with advanced recording technology in sound (gramophone) and image (photography and film) to introduce a palimpsest of ideas about ethnicity, nationalism, and imperialism to the general public. A full overview of the development of anthropology as it developed in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is beyond the scope of this book and outside of its stated purpose. My references to the history of anthropology in Spain are limited to projects that have direct bearing on the main topic of each chapter. Thus, the work done in Madrid, Barcelona, and to a lesser extent Valencia will take precedence over those projects undertaken in the Basque Country, Andalucía, and Galicia, even though important anthropological studies with social and political ramifications were undertaken in all of these communities. Techniques and developing theories were exchanged at national conferences, and Spanish anthropologists shared their findings with the international community. As has been explored in the French context, the relationship between ethnography and the avant-garde is provocative. In the case of Spain, these connections, though rarely discussed by art historians, existed and were often fueled by government projects that brought the specialized research of the social sciences to the attention of a broader public, which included Spain’s leading artists and writers. These projects signaled key moments in which documentary crossed disciplinary, class, and artistic divides.

The first chapter takes one of these projects as its focus to explore documentary photography in the context of tourism, architecture, ethnography, and politics. The architects Ramon Reventós and Francesc Folguera turned to photography as a means to document their trips across Spain in preparation for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Along with art historian and promoter Miguel Utrillo and the artist Xavier Nogués, they were commissioned by the Spanish government to build an artificial town that would feature a monastery, a plaza, commercial businesses, and examples of monumental and domestic architecture. From the hundreds of photographs they took, the architects drafted the plans for the Poble Espanyol or “The Spanish Town.” The relationship of photography to objective knowledge allowed the illusion of unity to be built out of what were photographic documents of individual buildings and their details. This process of transformation was not dissimilar to the transformation documentary photographs underwent in numerous anthropological archives in Barcelona during the same period. The Arxiu d’Etnografia i Folklore de Catalunya (AEFC), for example, kept photographic archives of architecture, customs, and types that were used comparatively with a collection of mass-reproduced images, from postcards to newspaper clippings. Taken as a whole, the archive was meant to produce a composite understanding of Catalonia. In the case of the Poble Espanyol, this was extended to include representative details from across Spain. The image of difference unified was critical to the town’s planning, and to General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who embraced the exposition as a way to publicize the nation’s political stability, which was actually unraveling, and its viability as a tourist attraction for foreign travelers. As such, the government’s plans were ambitious: to demonstrate that Spain was peaceful, technologically advanced, and unified nationally through the conservation of its history and traditions.

The creators of the Poble Espanyol were all Catalan. It was their burden to translate the dictatorship’s centrist ideology into architecture. Their task was made more difficult by the town’s location in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, one of the regions most associated with separatist tendencies. (The ethnographic research conducted by the AEFC and other organizations was closely associated with Catalan nationalist projects.) Critics at the time recognized the town’s duality, which mirrored the duality of documentary itself: it was both fantasy and reality, Catalan and Spanish. Photography formed the foundation for this national fantasy and helped suspend disbelief by providing a visual language through which national myths operated. Women dressed in regional costumes took photographs of visitors in the town’s plaza, and elaborate festivals were recorded with the help of the camera. By grounding their project in the truth value of photography, the architects were able to transform the potentially fragmented space of an architectural collage into the re-creation of a trip across Spain, thereby turning a space that was potentially fractured—artistically and politically—into an illusion of coherence. How this illusion was maintained (and undermined) from within and outside the Poble’s walls is one of the major questions this chapter addresses.

As the Poble Espanyol was being erected, the Spanish avant-garde was mounting its own demonstrations on the role of documentary. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí led fellow artists in the publication of manifestos and the exhibition of works that sparked controversy and directly questioned the nationalist use of film and photography by Spain’s artists and bureaucrats. The lens through which they viewed and understood documentary was bifurcated in important political and artistic ways. Both Buñuel and Dalí were developing strong connections to France at this time, and their works of 1929–33 draw on national and foreign sources. Neither won the financial or critical success in Spain that they achieved abroad, though both were frequently featured in the national press. Creating footholds in Spain and France offered them the opportunity (and the distance) to make works that imaginatively questioned, disrupted, and intervened with national art and politics.

The second and third chapters of this book examine the surrealist challenge mounted by Dalí and Buñuel during this period. The second chapter looks at their work from 1929 to 1931, especially as it relates to the discourse on documentary and nationality posed in Catalonia, and in Spain in general, at the time of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Buñuel and Dalí consciously mined existing national sources and cited, in their work, debates on the use of mass media to represent rural Spain. In 1929, Dalí published a series of articles in the Catalan newspaper La Publicitat. Titled “Documental París—1929,” the articles were written by Dalí while he was in Paris filming Un Chien andalou with Buñuel. Dalí’s installments included observations about the artists, writers, and sites that he saw while visiting the French capital. On the surface, they might have been taken as another version of a contemporary artist’s travel writing, except that Dalí used the occasion to propose a theory of documentary as antistyle. Shortly thereafter, Dalí began publishing his emerging ideas about paranoia and its critical potential as an analytic and creative tool. Throughout his writings, he challenges the idea that a document is transparent by linking visuality to perceptual deformation. Dalí put forward a more-developed explanation of his paranoiac-critical method in the 1930s and published his work concurrently in both Spain and France, drawing together his own observations with those of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Both published their articles on paranoia in the same issue of the Parisian magazine Minotaure in 1933; Dalí’s text develops his earlier theories and continues to bring experiences and images first encountered in Spain into the core of his paranoiac-critical method.

In 1930, while Buñuel was in the Catalan coastal town of Cadaqués filming a sequence for L’Âge d’or, he crafted an approximately two-minute long film about Dalí’s father and stepmother/aunt. Like Dalí, he overlaid the particular experiences of national context with a critical lens informed by avant-garde practice. For years the film was hidden by Dalí’s sister in a cookie tin, apparently suppressed by the family, and only recently entered a public archive. Titled Menjant garotes (Eating Sea Urchins) by the Filmoteca of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the documentary was shown only once, probably in private, and was never accounted for by Buñuel in his filmographies or biographies. Yet, it is a significant piece in his trajectory and of importance for an understanding of how Buñuel developed an interest in documentary and the ways in which it could be used to reveal oedipal narratives and ethnographic material in everyday practices. The film captures a day in the life of the Dalí family by following Dalí’s father, a prominent notary, through his domestic rituals: reading and listening to music, taking coffee outside, surveying his garden, and sitting down to a feast of sea urchins and wine. Under the guise of a family or amateur film, Buñuel carefully composed an ethnographic and psychoanalytic document about the relationship of Dalí to his father and the chain of associations that turn an apparently banal subject into a disturbing revelation. Although neither Dalí’s early writings nor this first “documentary” by Buñuel have received sustained attention by English language scholars, both works are critical to understanding the connections these artists attempted to draw between formal experimentation and an interrogation of the conventions of family and nation.

Issues of context must be understood in order to consider the formal and thematic innovations that Dalí and Buñuel introduced to audiences, no matter how limited, during the 1920s and 1930s. Both artists blended their attention to national culture with strategies and images that they shared with members of the international avant-garde. This is especially significant when one recalls that at the same moment that Buñuel and Dalí were incorporating (and challenging) current ideas about ethnography and representation similar approaches were being utilized by French artists in publications like Documents: Archeologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Varietés (Paris, 1929–30) and in the writings of Georges Bataille.

The subject of the third chapter is Buñuel’s second documentary, Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread. The approximately thirty-minute film, which deals with the social problems of Spain’s most debated case of rural desolation, poverty, and disease, was shot in Las Hurdes, Extremadura, during the spring of 1933. The region of Las Hurdes received widespread public attention from the government and the press in the early twentieth century, including visits from King Alfonso XIII in 1922 and 1929. Even though it drew on previous documentary photographs and films of the area and, in turn, became part of a growing archive of images on Las Hurdes that circulated in the public sphere during the 1930s, the film was censored by the government. Land Without Bread is a key example of the documentary paradox I have been describing and of the confluence of multinational and multilingual documentarians in Spain during this period. Buñuel’s crew was composed of artists, writers, educators, and advocates from Spain and France, all of whom were leftist in their political sympathies but whose allegiance to specific parties varied. Buñuel’s cameraman Eli Lotar had published in Documents. Co-writer Pierre Unik was an active surrealist and belonged to the Communist Party in France. Assistant Rafael Sánchez Ventura was a labor organizer, and educator, and an Anarchist. Artist Ramón Acín, also an Anarchist, put up the funding for the film. In the camera work he did for Land Without Bread, Lotar cited his own previous photographs from Documents as well as capturing references to earlier representations of Las Hurdes.

Through juxtaposition, Buñuel created a documentary that worked on many levels at once: as a socially conscious film; as an exploration into the mechanisms of poverty, disease, and ritual; and as an examination of documentary itself as a constructed form. Buñuel admitted years later that the region continued to attract his attention and that he had wanted to conduct a study of Las Hurdes with Jacques Lacan but never had the opportunity. The continued crossings of Buñuel and Dalí in this territory are striking: both found Spanish culture and customs an area ripe for the application of psychoanalytic theories. For its part, Land Without Bread has attracted the attention of critics and scholars from many fields, including film studies, Hispanic studies, and anthropology, but it has rarely been considered by art historians—even though both Dalí’s writings and Buñuel’s documentaries are central examples of how the avant-garde involved itself directly in the ways that modern social and political issues had an impact on the standards and expectations of advanced visual representation.

For Spanish artists working almost exclusively in Spain during the Second Republic, their relationship to documents and documentary style in photography and film was no less complex. The artists included in the following chapters are a heterogeneous group whose political and artistic affiliations were dynamic, often changing or intensifying with shifts in the nation’s policies. Many of them were involved in government-sponsored programs. Some had direct contact with international artistic and political movements, while others were more local in their commitments. They all put an engagement with documentary practices at the center of their activities, which directly or indirectly intersected with those of Dalí and Buñuel. In some instances, the work of these artists and those of their surrealist colleagues were juxtaposed in ways that put the conditions of avant-garde and institutional documentary into dialogue. This occurred with Dalí’s writings on documentary, which often appeared side by side with articles on and examples of documentary projects by the government, especially the Poble Espanyol. Buñuel’s Land Without Bread operated similarly. Photographic stills from the film appeared as anonymous documents in the politicized literary magazine Octubre, which was edited by his friends Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León. In these examples, photographs and films became mobile referents, unhinged from their correspondence to a single political or artistic reading.

The fourth chapter of this book considers one of the most important government sponsored uses of documentary photography and film. The Misiones Pedagógicas, or educational missions, took young artists and writers out of the city and into the countryside during the same years that Buñuel was making and attempting to distribute Land Without Bread. The Misiones were established in 1931 with the declaration of the Second Republic. They were designed and promoted by Manuel B. Cossío, who was one of the founding members of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) and the Misiones’ first director. The ILE had emerged during the nineteenth century as a way to introduce reforms into education by creating environments for the teaching of science, literature, and the arts that emphasized reason and education as the means to modern enlightenment. The Residencia de Estudiantes, where Buñuel and Dalí lived while they went to school in Madrid, was begun by the ILE and modeled after the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in Great Britain. One of the fundamental tools used by scholars in the ILE was the excursion, which was driven by the idea that collecting empirical data about the geography, philology, and customs of the nation’s rural population would provide the keys to understanding Spanish culture in the face of the state’s political and social difficulties. Most of the activities of the Misiones were centered around theater, film, and the exhibition of replicas of works of art from the Prado Museum. In addition to bringing films out to show, artists like José Val del Omar made dozens of documentaries about the Misiones and aspects of ritual and tradition that he encountered during his trips. Of the films that Val del Omar made during the 1930s, only a few survive. Fortunately, his documentary work can be reconstructed through his still photographs that appeared widely in the press.

This chapter explores the coexistence of projects like the Misiones Pedagógicas with the debates surrounding Buñuel’s work to test out how notions of dissidence and documentary were challenged from within and beyond Spain’s institutions. A broad understanding of the multiple uses of documentary emerges. For the Misiones it was a question not only of connecting with rural Spain but also of establishing points of exchange between the modern innovations of the city and the traditions of the countryside. Photography and film were enlisted as the means through which these opportunities were created and recorded. This chapter also considers photographic and cinematic representations of rural Spain made by other photographers. Among the most striking contrasts to the work of Buñuel and Val del Omar is that of José Ortiz-Echagüe, a pictorialist photographer who held deeply traditional views about Spanish culture and politics. His photographic technique was equally conservative: he used a large-format camera and made Fresson prints from his negatives. Each print was individually elaborated. The time-intensive process was paired with a prolific publishing career in which he made his photographs available to audiences all over the world. Ortiz-Echagüe’s work was praised by critics in the academy and the avant-garde alike. Important for my investigation is that his photographs were among the first purchased by the Museo del Pueblo Español in Madrid; they were considered both works of art and ethnographic documents.

All these artists—Dalí, Buñuel, Val del Omar, and Ortiz-Echagüe—saw their work circulate in the press and exhibitions throughout the 1930s. The initial meanings and intentions of their images were often transformed, especially when translated into the new radicalized contexts of the Civil War. The fifth chapter focuses on Josep Renau, a graphic artist from Valencia, and the program of photomurals that he designed for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris. Renau was an active member of the Communist Party and was a well-known editor and poster designer whose writings fueled numerous polemics on the political function of art. In the murals, Renau incorporated previous documentary images to create a photographic narrative that led visitors through aspects of the Republic’s reforms in agriculture, education, the arts, and culture. In addition to subjects directly related to the war, Renau also included murals about regional trades and customs. Among the subjects featured, the panels dedicated to the Misiones Pedagógicas received the most attention.

The chapter begins by studying Renau’s early editorial and montage work. He was a constant appropriator of documentary photographs and often used the same images repeatedly in different contexts. By taking Renau as a case study, my purpose is to focus on the process through which one artist encountered and established a dialogue with the documentary paradox. In the Spanish Pavilion, he incorporated images of republican projects that he had earlier protested, while at the same time he infused the government’s reformist rhetoric with images and ideas that came from his own contact with Soviet propaganda.

Renau designed a complex visual program for the pavilion that brought together representations of rural Spain under the auspices of the unifying program of the government’s antifascist rhetoric. Yet, when the original contexts of these photographs are considered, we realize that formal and political dissonance threatened the pavilion’s visual stability. Buñuel was in charge of the film program for the pavilion, but his Land Without Bread was excluded and shown elsewhere in Paris. Val del Omar’s photographs were included in Renau’s murals, as were images taken from various commercial, anthropological, and government archives. Ortiz-Echagüe’s photographs were said to have hung alongside Renau’s murals in the section dedicated to the popular arts. Meanwhile, Ortiz-Echagüe was fighting with the pro-Francoist forces and his photographs were later used on the covers of such New York magazines as Spain, which supported Franco’s efforts in the war and later his regime. Few foreign critics of the period recognized the potential volatility that these documentary pairings held. Most paid more attention to Picasso’s Guernica than they did to the issues represented in Renau’s murals. Had they considered the two in relation, they might have recognized in Picasso’s engagement with current events and his use of fractured planes and a reduced palette of black, white, and gray something of the contested value that documentary held for Spain’s other artists during this period.

Undoubtedly, the artists included in the Spanish Pavilion were well aware of the document’s dual status as institutional support and avant-garde protest. How documentary was utilized during the war was the result of a combination of factors, including the embrace of realism, the politicization of the arts, and, perhaps most significant, a shortage of fresh supplies of film stock and photographic paper. The choice to reuse earlier documentary images brings to the fore the relationship between choice and necessity. The images that were selected for use in the pavilion and the ways in which they were juxtaposed and framed was the result of the creativity of Spain’s artists. The decision to draw from archives and photographers whose political agendas may not have corresponded with those of the Republic resulted from several factors, among them the economic realities of war and the facility with which documentary images could acquire new meanings when recaptioned or juxtaposed in different ways. The ability of these documentary images to operate openly and provocatively throughout this roughly ten-year period, and the insight of Spain’s artists in recognizing their potential duality, is one of the most striking aspects of the way the documentary paradox functioned in 1930s Spain.

The final chapter comes back to Dalí and his interest in the antiartistic status of documents. The focus is Dalí’s Le Mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet, a manuscript written in the late 1930s and published by Jean Jacques Pauvert in Paris in 1963. Most critics have read the text as strictly autobiographical or as the key to the iconography of Dalí’s Millet-inspired paintings. My reading is different in that I consider the marked parallels between the manuscript, Freudian theories about folklore, and the writings on totalitarianism and socially committed art by Dalí’s contemporaries. I claim that Dalí’s theories about paranoia were also an extended interrogation of larger debates on documentary and the representation of popular culture that were prevalent in Spain and France during this period. His writings unexpectedly provide a critical commentary on documentary that stands alone for its insights into the connections between psychoanalysis and politics, folklore and mass reproduction.

By charting a decade of Spanish artists’ use (and reuse) of photographic and cinematic documents, this book attempts to shift the terms of modernism. It takes artists whose contributions have been valued in histories of European modern art (Dalí and Buñuel) and considers them in relation to national debates on the role of technology in representing myths of nationality and modernity. The goal is not simply to bring artists like Francesc Folguera, Ramon Reventós, José Val del Omar, and Josep Renau into the art historical canon, but rather to recognize that what constitutes the modern experience was actively negotiated by artists in contexts of complex historical and social specificity. These conditions took the discourse of art outside the gallery and placed it directly in contact with a public who, like Spain’s leading artists, was also a participant-observer in the construction of images of self and collective identity that took documentary as a principal means of recording and expression. Each case study takes this conclusion as a point of departure for an examination of how the merging of mechanical reproduction with traditional subject matter brought about the document’s paradox during a period in Spanish history when the shock of the new was tempered by the weight of the nation’s traditions and customs. Images of Spain’s rural traditions and customs became, in turn, the constitutive forms of modernity.

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