Description:
Explores how definitions of Spanish modernisms from 1874 to 1923 were dependent upon the concepts of degeneration and regeneration. Analyzes the relation between these concepts by examining representations of the body in specific spaces.
Brief description: Oscar E. Vázquez is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Inventing the Art Collection: Patrons, Markets, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain, also published by Penn State.
Review Quotes:
"Vázquez's location of Spanish visual cultures within this intricate interdisciplinary kaleidoscope of fin de siglo artists, writers, criminologists, eugenicists, neurologists and scientists illuminates a national paranoia that festered in Spain from the 'national disaster'--seemingly foretold by The Descent of Man--that signified for so many 'the end' of the Spanish race."
--Fae Brauer Burlington Magazine