Al Andalus at the 'Pintores de Africa' Exhibitions

The Pintores de África exhibitions, organized by Franco's regime annually in Madrid from 1950 onwards, were of considerable scale, involving Spanish and Moroccan artists and musicians as well as Spanish art critics, writers, scholars, and architectural historians. They have thus far escaped art-historical scrutiny. Whilst at odds with the established canon of twentieth-century modernism, they are relevant to global perspectives in history of art as well as to cultural studies concerned with questions of otherness. This article examines the staging of the memory of Muslim Spain (al Andalus 711-1492) at the Pintores de Africa exhibitions. Foregrounding the ideological underpinnings and meanings of representation, it reveals how al-Andalus was presented as a shared past, of which both Spaniards and Moroccans could be proud. The Pintores de Africa exhibitions celebrated Spain’s identification with its multicultural past and contemporary Moroccans. The discourse of a ‘Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood’ was not ideologically innocent, nor any more benevolent than an alternative discourse based on ‘difference’. It was simply an alternative pathway to power, in this case over Moroccans who were forced to accept the ‘help’ of their more advanced ‘sibling’ through the manipulation of the memory of al-Andalus and its cultural heritage.