The Spanish Element in Our Nationality”

Spain and America at the World’s Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876–1915

M. Elizabeth Boone

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780271085241
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality" delves beneath the traditional "English-only" narrative of U.S. history, using Spain's participation in a series of international exhibitions to illuminate more fully the close and contested relationship between these two countries.

Written histories invariably record the Spanish financing of Columbus's historic voyage of 1492, but few consider Spain's continuing influence on the development of U.S. national identity. In this book, M. Elizabeth Boone investigates the reasons for this problematic memory gap by chronicling a series of Spanish displays at international fairs. Studying the exhibition of paintings, the construction of ephemeral architectural space, and other manifestations of visual culture, Boone examines how Spain sought to position itself as a contributor to U.S. national identity, and how the United States—in comparison to other nations in North and South America—subverted and ignored Spain's messages, making it possible to marginalize and ultimately obscure Spain's relevance to the history of the United States.

Bringing attention to the rich and understudied history of Spanish artistic production in the United States, "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality" recovers the "Spanishness" of U.S. national identity and explores the means by which Americans from Santiago to San Diego used exhibitions of Spanish art and history to mold their own modern self-image.

1

Inventing America at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial

VISITORS ENTERING THE SPANISH ART GALLERY at Philadelphia’s International Exhibition of 1876 encountered an impressive display of history paintings, many of which had received awards at earlier exhibitions in Madrid and Paris, hung salon style along the west wall of Memorial Hall (figs. 1 and 2). Spain shared the room with Sweden; Spanish paintings covered one side of the long gallery and Swedish pictures hung on the other. Prominently placed on the left and right ends of the Spanish wall were two historical subjects from the 1860s: Diòscoro Puebla’s First Landing of Columbus and Antonio Gisbert’s Disembarkation of the Puritans in America. Puebla depicted the famed Genoese commander kneeling in thanks, his sword touching the ground, standard fluttering in the breeze, his head raised heavenward. Gisbert’s protagonist likewise looks up toward God. These two Spanish paintings depict successive moments in American history. Columbus sailed on behalf of the Spanish in 1492, and the Pilgrims sailed from England more than one hundred years later, in 1620. The implications seem clear: a succession of travelers from a variety of European locales—Spain, Italy, and England, among others—arrived and contributed to the history of the country being celebrated at the Centennial of 1876.

Figure 1 Centennial Photographic Company, Memorial Hall—Spain, 1876. Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and Picture Collection, c021685.

Figure 2 Centennial Photographic Company, Vista del pabellòn de bellas artes, 1876. Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Patrimonio Nacional, RB FOT/684 (10202863). Photo © Patrimonio Nacional.

The Spanish commissioner responsible for arranging the works in Memorial Hall undoubtedly hoped that Spain might contribute to a conversation about the origins of the United States, but Philadelphia-born art critic Earl Shinn, writing under the pen name Edward Strahan, disagreed. He responded to Gisbert’s painting with undisguised surprise: “‘The Landing of the Puritans in America,’ by A. Gisbert, although it is a better piece of work than the others named, is chiefly interesting because no one hereabouts would ever have expected a Spanish artist to choose such a theme. ‘The Landing of Columbus’ . . . is, or ought to be, an entirely congenial theme with a Spanish painter, but ‘The Landing of the Puritans’—that is a very different matter.”¹ A Spanish painter might reasonably depict Columbus’s landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola because his journey, supported by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, laid the foundation for the colonization of America. Spanish attempts to speak about the English origins of the United States were unexpected, however, if not unwelcome. America, by 1876, had been firmly divided into the United States, which traced its history to England, and the mostly Spanish-speaking republics to the south. Spanish painters of American history, Shinn seems to suggest, should restrict themselves to subjects linked to Spanish America. The United States owed nothing to Spain.

The Spanish received a chilly response to their exhibitions of industrial and agricultural products as well. At best, U.S. critics saw Spanish participation at the Philadelphia fair as a surprisingly good presentation by a nation with which they had little in common. At worst, they found validation for entrenched preconceptions of Spain as a nation in decline, with limited contemporary reach beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Whereas Great Britain (and France, in artistic matters) functioned as motherland, Spain, much like Italy, was considered decadent, unworthy, and waning in importance. Spain and the United States were consolidating their national identities in the late nineteenth century, but the Spanish were trying to unite their country in ways that sat poorly with ideas being promoted in the United States. Spain presented itself as a nation with a rich agricultural tradition, a Catholic nation ruled by the recently restored Bourbon monarchy, whereas the United States was imagining itself as a democratic republic populated by Protestants who were modernizing their country’s agricultural base with the help of new industrial technologies. Language differences furthered their divide. Although both countries were working to integrate diverse populations into cohesive units, the strategies through which they hoped to accomplish this task contrasted with each other. Spain and the United States understood the past from different positions; they saw the present through different eyes. Neither Spain’s exhibition of fine arts nor its exhibitions of agriculture and industrial manufactures received a positive reception in Philadelphia, the city in which the Declaration of the Independence had been signed one hundred years earlier. This chapter will demonstrate that the invention of America, the creation of a singular U.S. national identity, demanded the exclusion of a Spanish point of view.

Commemorating the Past and Illustrating Advances

In truth, the Spanish were slow to prepare for the Philadelphia Centennial. On July 15, 1873, José Polo de Bernabé, the Spanish minister plenipotentiary in Washington, D.C., forwarded to Madrid the U.S. invitation to participate in an international exposition “designed to commemorate the Declaration of Independence of the United States, on the one hundredth anniversary of that interesting and historic national event.”² U.S. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had released his call on the day after the Fourth of July, patriotically proclaiming as the goal of the fair “the display of the results of Art and Industry of all nations . . . to illustrate the great advances attained, and the successes achieved, in the interest of Progress and Civilization during the century which will have then closed.”³ The fair’s ostensibly straightforward objective was twofold: to commemorate a moment in the past history of the United States and to mark the nation’s achievements in the present. On February 21, 1874, after a delay of seven months, the Spanish government issued a royal decree accepting the invitation.⁴ Two months later, Polo de Bernabé met with Fish to communicate acceptance on behalf of his government.⁵ Inattention, if not procrastination, characterized Spain’s initial response to the fair.

The Spanish were not the only ones who were slow to prepare for the centennial. The financial crisis of 1873 may be faulted for some slowdown in the action, while arguments over the site selection delayed preparations further.⁶ Ricardo Alfredo Palomino, Spanish consul in the City of Philadelphia, reported in October 1874 on continuing arguments in Congress over where the celebration was to be held and the refusal of various representatives to appropriate money that would support a fair in a state other than their own. Palomino updated his superiors on plans, continuing battles about the site, and costs four months later, in January 1875.⁷ Meanwhile, Fairmount Park commissioners released land to the Centennial Commission, and in the absence of a federal allocation, the City of Philadelphia began selling stock to finance the buildings. Design and construction, overseen by the German-born architect Hermann J. Schwarzmann, did not begin until the summer of 1875.

Prompted by another letter, this one from Caleb Cushing at the U.S. Legation in Madrid, Ministro de Fomento (Minister of Development) Carlos Navarro y Rodrigo finally appointed a large Spanish Centennial Commission consisting of some sixty individuals in October 1874 to prepare the Spanish exhibitions.⁸ Navarro, who was serving Spain’s short-lived First Republic, provided two reasons for participating in the fair. An exhibition of Spanish agricultural and industrial products in the United States could help expand Spain’s markets in Latin America, whose representatives would probably travel north to study this grand exhibition of industry; in addition, Spanish delegates in Philadelphia could learn more about raw materials and useful new technologies being developed on the other side of the Atlantic.⁹ Navarro, focusing on ways to align Spain with the other nations of western Europe, saw his country as a modernizing nation, even if industrialization was occurring at a slower rate than in other parts of the continent. Promoting the fine arts was of secondary importance, and little mention of artistic participation appears in official correspondence related to the government’s decision to take part in the celebration.

Navarro lost his position with the fall of the First Republic at the end of 1874, but diplomatic discussions continued through the spring of 1875, primarily about the allocation of space. Philadelphia organizers initially offered Spain a total of fifteen thousand square feet, approximately the amount it had occupied at the 1873 Exposition in Vienna, and Spanish representatives wanted more. Palomino, the consular representative in Philadelphia, suggested seventy thousand, but his superiors thought this was too much. They agreed to request twenty thousand in the Main Exhibition Building for manufactured and industrial goods, twenty thousand in Agricultural Hall, and four thousand each for Machinery and Memorial Halls.¹⁰ As costs escalated, doubts began to surface, and by July the Spanish government was sending inquiries to consular representatives in other European nations to find out who was participating and how much money they were spending.¹¹

Toward the middle of August 1875, when many of Madrid’s residents were on vacation, the new minister of development, Manuel de Orovio, issued an order dissolving Navarro’s sixty-member commission and establishing a much smaller committee.¹² Two months later, Francisco (Francesc) Lòpez Fabra, a Catalan publisher who had served as a delegate at the 1873 Vienna Exposition, was appointed royal commissioner-general to the fair (fig. 3). His Memoria administrativa serves as an important account of Spanish activity at the fair, as does the collection of photographs produced by the Centennial Photographic Company and compiled in an album for presentation upon his return.¹³ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Inventing America at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial
• 2 Defining (and Defending) Spain in Barcelona and Paris, 1888 and 1889
• 3 Marginalizing Spain (and Embracing Cuba) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition
• 4 Reasserting Spain in America at the 1910 Centennial Exhibitions
• 5 Using Spain to Ignore Mexicans at the 1915 California Fairs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index