La Guerra Civil: The Impact of Civil War on Spain’s Art History

Upon walking into the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum along the Paseo del Prado you are greeted with two austerely elegant portraits: those of the Hungarian-German businessman turned art collector Heinrich Thyssen and his Spanish wife Carmen ‘Tita’ Thyssen (née Cervera). The portraits demand awe and respect: rightfully so, given their profound influence upon Spain’s artistic assets. They share the entrance corridor with similarly styled portraits of King Juan Carlos I and Doña Sofia, for the Thyssens are Spanish curatorial royalty. Curious, for the Thyssen dynasty’s origins are anything but Spanish.

When Heinrich Thyssen started his collection of Ghirlandaios and other quattrocento masters, Spain was in the throes of its ‘Guerra Civil’ which saw the liberal Republicans up in arms against the burgeoning falangistas of the future Franco regime. From 1936 to 1939, the socialist Republic faced General Francisco Franco’s fascist forces – devastating the country with civilian suffering which was later channeled into art (think Picasso’s Guernica painting). The falangistas won the civil war, and Franco ruled Spain under a military dictatorship from 1939 until his death in 1975. Whilst the rest of Europe was rebuilding post-WWII, Spain collapsed in on itself. Intense patriotism meant little cultural or economic contact with the rest of the continent. Tragically bloodthirsty and culturally unreachable, the country was a far cry from the ‘dynamic and charismatic’ European nation that captured Robert Elms’ heart in his 1992 book A Portrait After The General (incidentally – or perhaps purposely – written the same year both the Thyssen and Reina Sofia opened in Madrid).

In the shroud of post-Franco recovery enter the Thyssens, imploding into the Spanish artistic scene when the country was at its most fragile. Heinrich’s marriage to former Miss Spain (Carmen ‘Tita’ Cervera) in 1985 generated a new sociopolitical alliance, one which revitalised Spanish artistic assets by linking them to a broader European outlook. You would think that the influence of Heinrich’s Spanish beauty queen would have diverted his collector’s gaze to the uniquely Spanish artistic canon: Velázquez and Goya, El Greco and Murillo. The couple did indeed transplant their rich collection from the family estate in Lugano to the newly renovated Villahermosa a stone’s throw away from the Prado. Yet Carmen’s own collection, bought for $350 million by the Spanish government at the museum’s opening in 1992, is distinctively un-Spanish. The museum’s ground floor rooms are filled with the entire European canon, from Brueghel to Kandinsky, sprinkled with a handful of early American gems (Jasper Francis Cropsey and Albert Birtstadt). You can stare into the conflicted eyes of German Post-Modernism and become consumed by the fiery colours of a Yosemite sunset in 1869. You can witness the Medici’s mercantile Florence and Gauguin’s fetishised brushes with Polynesia. The Thyssens had all this grandeur at their fingertips. And its presence in Spain marked a seismic shift from isolationism to reintegration into the European community.

The Thyssen museum, much like the image of ‘Tita’ herself, signals Spain’s cosmopolitan cultural influence. Robert Elms’ Portrait observes that whilst Barcelona was the cooler home of nationalistic leftists who were more Catalan (and thus, more European) than Spanish, Madrid is the country’s conservative bastion. The dry and fiery capital is the home of fiercely passionate Falangistas who are adamantly Spanish and vehemently un-European. Tita is herself Catalan born and bred, and fittingly married into a family who were key figures in the European artistic circuit, amassing the continent’s most rare and lucrative collections. Posing for an edition of Architectural Digest in their Swiss Villa Favorita in 1988, Baron and Baroness Thyssen revel in the Versailles-esque luxury of their ‘English room’, ‘French room’, and ‘Gothic room.’ Art and architectural feats are not displays of aristocratic ostentatiousness but rather weaponised mediums of their intellect and internationalism. The world’s beauty is at their disposal.

To better understand what this larger European narrative consisted of in the wake of Spain’s cultural and political regeneration, we can refer back to an archaic example of cultural diffusion: the plain Orientalism of Giovanni Antonio Guardi’s Scene in the Garden of a Seraglio painted in 1743. The work was part of a series of forty-three paintings depicting luscious court life in Constantinople and – to be very on theme – commissioned by German aristocrat Johann Matthias Von Schulenburg to decorate his numerous estates dotted around Germany. 

The painting itself shows a garden outlined by a fanciful marble border, in the centre of which sits a sultan smoking a pipe and ogling at a woman dressed in lapis lazuli blue. Of course with a scrutinising contemporary eye this scene evidences exoticism of the ‘other’, romanticising a fictional Middle East. Yet when considered in the context of international exchange, the Seraglio painting highlights growing accessibility and interchangeability of art. A Turkish sultan marvels at the splendour he possesses, and in turn the German duke admires this very same painting hung upon his palatial wall. And of course, many years later, a similar German aristocrat and his Spanish wife convey the canvas to a country which has yet to be enmeshed with the artistic canon of its surrounding geography. Spain was ripe for the plucking, and the Thyssens generously cultivated Madrid by diversifying the capital’s artistic offerings.

Though consistently surpassed by Paris and Rome, Madrid’s cultural profile is on the rise. The Thyssen-Bornemisza has been a key member of Madrid’s ‘golden triangle of art’ alongside the Prado and the Reina Sofia since 1992. The Prado houses Spain’s Baroque artistic hallmarks – tourists crowd around the infamous Las Meninas and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda. The Reina Sofia is in touch with the far more recent collective memory, displaying the colossal Guernica and other civil war relics so that Spain can never forget the perils of its regional divides. Though Madrid is typically associated with sweeping notions of ‘Spanishness’ as the nation’s heartland, the city’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism of the late eighties and early nineties reveals a tangible effort to distance the capital from a dictatorial past and partake in a richer collective visual history. And what more sophisticated to import to the Peninsula than an eminently elegant dynasty which spans more than five generations across myriad European nations. Tita’s keen artistic eye found fruitful soil indeed.