Publication information

National Lessons

Spain has often looked at itself in the eyes of others, and forged its identity by means of a dialogue between its historical journey and foreign perceptions of it. In this collection of articles, it is explored in two sections that represent both extremes of the relationship. In the first, which begins with the anti-romantic Spain of Mario Praz, the nation’s changing identity is summed up through its pavilion in universal expositions: a conventional portrait that has started to transform views like the MoMA’s or the traffic of architectures that has made us ‘a peninsula without a perimeter.’ In the second, some beacons of Spanish culture – in literature and painting, but especially in architecture, from El Escorial to the Prado – are commented on to form a golden portrait whose brilliance conceals the shadows of common lives, which the Generation of ’98 found in the narrative of domestic intimacy, producing critical writings that opened up the doors of political and aesthetic modernity.

Collection ‘Balances’, 2023
Language: Spanish
Soft cover
112 pages