UC San Diego

This dissertation interrogates the relationship between state and civil society through the making of visual arts policy in Franco’s Spain between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. Using a rich base of archival sources, it explores the relationships and interactions between members of the regime’s arts apparatus and members of Spain’s artistic community and demonstrates how these affected the shape of the country’s domestic artistic life. The regime’s top-down attempts to command cultural life and unwillingness to democratize its artistic endeavors did not override artists’ bottom-up efforts to create the kind of artistic environment in which they wanted to live. By examining case studies of artists, art students, and gallerists in moments of conflict with members of the regime’s arts apparatus, I trace the evolution of their collective disillusionment with the regime, while also offering detailed accounts of individual protagonists on all sides. My emphasis on the growth of what I call ‘artistic advocacy’ allows me demonstrate the numerous ways in which members of the artistic community pushed for artistic pluralism and autonomy. Furthermore, I recognize a heretofore unstudied group with respect to Spanish social movements – visual artists – and to add them to the body of scholarship on the politicization of actors who came to undermine the regime’s vision and authority. In framing the history of Spanish domestic art policy not as a regime-only endeavor, but rather as the result of the regime’s relationship with civil society, I challenge the dominant scholarly narratives that portray the regime’s cultural policy either as one of ‘repression,’ resulting in a “cultural desert,” or one of ‘liberalization,’ in which regime figures slackened control over artistic affairs. Rather, I demonstrate that neither interpretation accurately captures the dynamic in which the arts apparatus saw itself as facilitating and cultivating artistic life, albeit blind to its own lack of legitimacy. In analyzing the complex and fraught interactions between regime figures and members of Spain’s visual arts community, and tracing Spaniards’ awareness of the regime’s contradictions, I reveal a new angle to understanding the increasingly fragmented political culture of late Francoism.