Renegotiating the Boundaries of the Virile Nation: the España negra of José Gutiérrez Solana in the art exhibitions of postwar Spain (1940–45)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, Francoist discourse on the nation was strongly linked to the idea of virility. All the different political cultures of the dictatorship defined the Spanish nation as intrinsically shaped around values that spoke firstly of daring, strength and vigour, but also of self-discipline, restraint and control. Despite the intensity of this discourse, the narrative it presented revealed porosities and elasticities that permitted ambiguous images to filter through that challenged this language of national virility. One example was the imagery of José Gutiérrez Solana, a leading artist of the regime and assiduous participant in its art exhibitions, but one who, with his dark paintings full of beggars, death and fanaticism, presented a substantially different image of the Spanish nation. Beginning with this apparent contradiction, the intention of this article is to examine the discourse deployed around Solana in order to explore the ways in which the profile of the virile and victorious nation was renegotiated to include his work within it, and the degree to which the key to this inclusion lay in a set of reinterpretations intended to extend virility to an artist otherwise close to images of the “feminization” of Spain.