Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-05, Section: A, page: 1368.

Adviser: Romy Golan.

This dissertation examines two fundamental issues that intersected in Spanish art of the 1930s: the desire to study, reconstruct, and imagine things rural and the overwhelming embrace of the "document" to do so. Amidst social turmoil---the last year of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, the Second Republic, and the Civil War---the avant-garde, ethnographic institutions, and the dominant political forces shared in the production and appropriation of images of rural Spain from 1929 to 1939. When issues of nationalism, centralization, and reform were highly contested, the "document"---photographic, filmic, textual---offered a shared reference point for artists, government agencies, and the masses.

To demonstrate the Spanish avant-garde's participation in these debates, I focus on four cases: Salvador Dali and the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, Luis Bunuel's 1933 documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin Pan, Josep Renau's photomurals for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, and Salvador Dali's 1938 Le mythe tragique de l'Angelus de Millet. In all, the writings and works of the avant-garde intersect with those of the nation's institutions and politico-ethnographic archives. Artists known for their participation in the French avant-garde were actively engaging issues and images with highly mediated national significance. In situating these artists with their compatriots, a new understanding of Spanish artistic production emerges.

As the relation of radical artists to government changed over the course of the decade, becoming closer as the Civil War approached, artists turned back to the visual artifacts that had marked the turn of the century and the 1920s. Recycling images that had a public history in the press, these artists were self-conscious consumers and producers of a national "archive" of ethnic representations. Dali, Bunuel, and Renau were commentators on and fabricators of agrarian myths. Far from uniform in their responses to this problematic, their work indicates the complexity of Spain's reception of and contribution to European modernism.