Throughout these days, shocking images of marches in Spanish cities and towns are still making headlines in international newspapers and their digital editions after a two-year hiatus from parades – rather than Easter as liturgical time. A global pandemic has forced it. I wonder how some of the major headlines in the United States – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post – also spare space to collect the distant drama presented on the most remote streets. Districts of our country. A strong reference may be the reaction that young American students often experience when they visit some of the local Passion Museum. Until the pictures the brothers are working on until next Easter Sunday, all feelings will explode except indifference: excitement, surprise, astonishment, horror … and even tears.
This is the so-called cultural influence caused by the Spanish way of life and customs. In the United States, one of the first symptoms of the disease, discovered by a series of intellectuals in the late 19th century called “Spanish fever”, has nothing to do with the flu, which kills millions. In the last section of the Great War. No, it was not in itself a disease that could be consulted in the medical tract. Whether or not, as the American Spaniard Richard Kagan defined it, it consisted of a rather unbridled appetite for Spanish art and culture, which, in the most serious cases, could lead to the phenomenon of ‘Hispanophilia’.
This fever, which incubated in the nineteenth century, began after the end of the Spanish-American War, forcing Spain to get rid of its last colonies – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines – in 1898. Before that for Americans. Spain was a decadent country about which there was almost nothing, except the negative impact it gave to the harmful propaganda of the Spanish black legend after the conquest of the New World. Just a year later, one of America’s finest sculptors, Augustus St. Goodens, traveled to Spain to see if what a friend had warned his fellow artist, John Singer Sargent, was true. After traveling from north to south, from Burgos and Toledo to Andalusia, Saint-Godens not only verified the existence of this particular “Spanish fever” but also became its tempting power.
According to Kagan, the sculptor had an unbridled curiosity about the culture and art of the “fascinating land”. It was a new Spain that the American romantic writer Washington Irving had already described as a “hospitable” and “direct” country that was able to preserve many centuries-old customs, traditions, and lifestyles that were compatible with them. With progress. “Country of Prisons,” says Richard Kagan in his book Spanish Madness: America’s Passion for the Spanish World, 1779-1939. Elegant gentlemen, gypsy dancers and strong peasants in typical dresses. “
The unusual heat was strange because in the United States they knew almost nothing Spanish, beyond the furor that the paintings of Baroque masters such as Jose de Ribera or Diego Velველzquez began. Suddenly Spanish became funny. In modern terms, Spain “sold”. Thomas Alva Edison dedicated one of the first films in history to the performances of Spanish flamenco dancer La Carmencita, which delighted audiences in New York and Chicago in an extraordinary document that has now been digitized on YouTube. The boom also infected inheritance. Architect Stamford White, inclined to design historic buildings of Spanish descent, soon crowned the reform of Madison Square Garden, an auditorium located in the heart of Manhattan with a copy of Giralda of Seville.
Spain may have been a degraded country in the eyes of Americans, but that prospect could not hide its amazing and seductive past. In fact, it was a conclusion drawn from a theory that historian William Prescott has successfully advanced since the early nineteenth century. His famous “paradigm” established the evil of our country, aggravated – he argued – by the monarchical absolutism and religious fanaticism imposed by the Austrians after the prominent period of the Catholic monarchs, which was then embodied in the excesses of the Inquisition. His theory was concretized in a paradox: Spain represented a decline and a lack of freedom, while the United States introduced the opposite values into the world: economic prosperity, trade development, and the benefits of democracy. In short, America was a new thing; Spain, old.
So the Americans discovered that what they really cared about in Spain was his past. The heritage, culture, arts, and customs that gave rise to the “Spanish fever” in the United States date back to the Middle Ages. A phenomenon that, along with the country’s economic strength, creates a black stage in the art trade: the big magnates wanted to conquer part of the picturesque country that lies between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It was a fascinating Spain of Roman and Gothic buildings, a coexistence of Christians and Muslims, people whose lifestyles were frozen in time and now appear virtually intact in modern times. It was this last detail that finally convinced some of the most influential Spaniards of the “Spanish fever”. And in particular, Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Spanish-American Society (HSA) in 1904.
“I think the museum is the most important in the world.” The phrase gathered in Huntington’s biography would not have been surprising if it had not come from a 12-year-old boy. The idea of a center that would spread Spanish culture was already forming in the mind of the young heir to the American Railway Empire. In fact, at the age of 14 he began learning Spanish and even as a teenager began several trips to Europe and Latin America. In 1892, when he was barely twenty years old, his dream came true: to discover Spain. The discovery changed all the mental schemes that had been developed over the years of learning. In this groundbreaking experience, following in the footsteps of Sid’s historical and legendary mix of Spanish culture, he realized that what he was really looking for was far from the cities: it was a knowledge of cities, villages – where people’s customs and lives were at a standstill – a personal investigation. To which he devoted much of his life.
After the death of his father, Archer Milton Huntington disposed of the legacy capital to establish the institute in 1904, which now holds the largest collection of Spanish heritage outside our borders: Spanish society opened its doors to the west of Manhattan. The purpose of his promoter was clear. Huntington wanted to gather as wide a representation of Spanish culture, folklore, and art as possible so that he could use it selflessly in the service of scholars. To do this, he considered it essential to get closer to his biggest exhibitors. Known for his close personal relationship with the Valencian artist Joaquin Sorola, to whom he commissioned a set of paintings depicting exactly the exoticism that Americans saw in Spanish traditions. Therefore, Sorola did not delay the scenes from Holy Week in Seville in the collection he donated to charity in 1914.
The Huntington Crusade was fueled by the increasingly overcrowded shelves of the Spaniards with documentary collections. By the most up-to-date criteria for doing so, and for the time being, he was surrounded by women who would task him with conservation in the library, museum, and other departments. For this reason, he also assigned one of the institution’s crucial tasks to a woman: photographer Ruth Matilda Anderson would become Huntington’s eye in Spain, which Sorola had previously portrayed. Anderson had to travel to Spanish cities to present “traditional trade”, “festive events” or “religious ceremonies”, says Professor Noemi Espinoza in his doctoral dissertation on the photographer. During the Holy Week marches in Seville, Valladolid, Asturias or Gran Canaria, the American portrait will find the most valuable material of his many years of career.
Thus, in 1926, Ruth Anderson and her adventure partner Francis Spalding embarked on an expedition that would be a decisive step for the institution and for them. It was unusual – not to say it seemed crazy at the time – for two women, alone, to rent a car and walk through the most remote villages. With deep religious beliefs and as if it were an evangelical mission, Anderson christened the car the “Virgin” and placed a kind of “covenant ark” at the place of loading, which was replaced by a table. Follow heavy and delicate photo techniques. The past seven months between Galicia and present-day Castilla y Le ლეn have brought more than 2,000 photos to the Spaniards, making it one of the most intense discoveries in Anderson’s career.
After working with the usual and thorough documentation, the photographer chose the city of Zamora to complete the task. On this side, “he rediscovered examples of a lifestyle that was gradually abandoned, and that he considered traces, traces of a lost tradition that he insisted on discovering and photographing, no matter how insignificant, Huntington asked him to do.” Historian Espinoza, however, like his boss, the reality that met him shook his work schedule upside down.After the people of Zamora massively immortalized in the wake of Holy Week, he left the capital and traveled about thirty miles to his big city, about thirty miles away. , To find “authenticity”.
What he discovered during the march on Villacampo and the staging of a car accident – a passion drama performed by the townspeople – was exactly what his senior, a class, left speechless a few decades ago. A frozen life in the past that has fascinated Americans and, ultimately, one of the most decisive “Spanish fever” viruses in the United States. Anderson discovered the living remnants of the past, both in that theatrical performance and in the audience, with neighbors climbing on cars and trees, on tiptoes, so as not to miss the detail of the event. Although not reluctantly, she interviewed participants and interviewed women as a repository of rural traditions. His recordings covered a series of photos of Villa Campo, which, if not the highest quality – experts say, the Asturias footage – was at the zenith of the reporter – was a really important milestone in the conclusions of Ruth Anderson and the Spaniard himself.
It was the twenties and, after monopolizing a significant portion of buildings, works of art, ceilings, tapestries and all sorts of waste, the “Spanish fever” would begin to subside in the United States. After filling the halls of the Spaniards, and although photographic campaigns continued, Huntington believed that his compilation work was complete in the following decades. The admiration for Spanish customs – and Holy Week had all the ingredients – would last for a century in North America. till today.
Source: El Diario
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