The United States is probably the country outside of Spain which has valued Spanish art the most. This claim is based on the sheer number of Spanish works purchased in the recent history of this nation, the high quality of these works and their widespread distribution among most of the museums in the country?s leading cities. This fascination with Spanish art is reflected in the specialisation of some of these institutions, as well as in the way these works make up the most important core of some collections or are represented on par with those of other schools in more encyclopaedic museums. This monograph reveals the wonderful Spanish artistic heritage conserved in the museums of the United States and its enormous quality and interest, from the Middle Ages until contemporary art. With essays by the conservators of American museums and experts in Spanish art, this volume evaluates the importance of the works of art from Spain in the different museums and tells the story of how they have been collected in the United States of America.

A revealing exploration of Spain's significant impact on American painting in the 19th and early 20th century

In the course of the Spanish occupation of Mexico (New Spain) and Peru for three centuries, this confrontation of divergent ways of seeing and experiencing the world gave rise to new Latin American cultural traditions.

Including textiles, paintings and decorative arts, Archive of the Worldoffers a lucid alternative to traditional interpretations of art from the so-called New World Exquisitely illustrated with new photography, this stunning book represents the first comprehensive study of LACMA's notable holdings of Spanish American art. Following the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas in the 15th century, the region developed complex artistic traditions that drew simultaneously on Indigenous, European, Asian and African art. In 1565 the Spaniards conquered the Philippines, inaugurating a new commercial route that connected Asia, Europe and the Americas. Private homes and civic and ecclesiastic institutions in Spanish America were filled with imported and locally made objects. This confluence of riches signaled the status of the Americas as a major entrepôt--what one contemporaneous author described as "the archive of the world." Many works created in Spanish America were also shipped across the globe, attesting to their wide appeal. Arranged into five thematic sections, the volume features a conversation about LACMA's collection and nearly 100 catalog entries by various scholars, including Pablo F. Amador Marrero, Aaron M. Hyman, Rachel Kaplan, Paula Mues Orts, Jeanette F. Peterson, Elena Phipps, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, among others. These authoritative texts offer multiple access points to appreciate the material, aesthetic and historical aspects of the works, providing a lasting reference in this increasingly influential area of art history.

A dazzling combination of comics and essays sheds light on the rich but often overlooked contributions of Spanish immigrants to the political, cultural, and scientific history of the US.

“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.

Explores how one group of Latin American artists express their relationship to American art, history and culture.

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the “Black Legend,” which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt—California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida—there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain’s political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.

Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), son of one of the wealthiest men in America, decided that his passion for Spain had to be reflected by creating a museum and a library that would make his knowledge of Spanish art and culture available to his compatriots and that is how he founded in 1904 The Hispanic Society of America in New York. A section of more than two hundred of these treasures is being presented at important museums, such as the Museo del Prado (Madrid), el Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), and the Albuquerque, Cincinnati and Houston museums in the United States. This volume gathers the content of this great exhibition including a detailed file of each piece and an introductory essay telling the story of the Hispanic Society's creation and the scope of its collections.

The Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2006 to examine a little-known aspect of globalization in the early modern era. Specialists in the arts and history of Asia and Latin America came from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to present recent research on connections between the two areas. Edited by Denver Art Museum curators Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, this volume presents revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the symposium. Gustavo Curiel opens the volume with a discussion of the reception and re-interpretation of Asian motifs in the various art forms of viceregal New Spain (Mex-ico). Essays by Etsuko Rodríguez and George Kuwayama present detailed analyses of Chinese porcelains excavated in Mexico and Peru that were imported via the Manila galleon trade. Roxanna Brown uses new evidence from shipwrecks in Southeast Asia to document the China-Manila branch of the trade network. Jorge Rivas looks at colonial furniture made in northern South America using Asian-inspired techniques and motifs. Sofía Sanabrais describes the adaptation of the Asian folding screen by Mexican artists. Meiko Nagashima addresses the exportation of Japanese lacquer traditions to Spanish America and Spain. Sonia Ocaña analyzes Japanese-inspired elements in shell-inlaid frames made in Mexico. Marjorie Trusted investigates the relationship to Asian models of Baroque ivory sculptures produced in the Americas; Abby Sue Fisher investigates the impact of Asian trade textiles on clothing in viceregal Mexico; and Clara Bargellini documents Asian trade goods at the missions of northern Mexico. An interdisciplinary study bringing together scholars from two fields of art and addressing a variety of artistic media, this beautifully illustrated volume will be an important resource for scholars and enthusiasts of Asian and Latin American art and history.