IT IS FIFTEEN years since an issue of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE was devoted to art in Spain. This might suggest some editorial neglect when compared with our more consistent attention to the art of other European countries. This is not in fact entirely true and is more a reflection of the burgeoning state of scholarship in Spain and the greater opportunities for local publication that have become available there in the last few decades. One might even say that a certain scholarly patriotism now prevails, and academics and curators in Spain are more keen to publish within their own country. This was certainly found to be the case with one or two kind but firm rebuffs which we received from potential contributors during the preparation of this issue. Fortunately, requests for articles were otherwise enthusiastically met and a similar issue for next year can be confidently predicted with the collaboration of Spanish as well as English and American writers.

From the 1960s to the later 1980s art and collecting in Spain and the country’s museums and galleries rarely featured in the Magazine. During that period, not one of the monthly Editorials was devoted to a single aspect of Spanish art and the Magazine’s indexes for the 1970s reveal that only two exhibitions in Spain were reviewed, both of them of works by Rubens. But for the 1980s, the figure jumps to over twenty and has continued to climb. In 1982 there appeared Douglas Cooper’s fanfare for the momentous return of Guernica to Spain, and a year later his account of the rejuvenation of the Prado; Editorials on Spanish art and on museums in Madrid were published in 1990 and 1992. Such facts disclose only a partial picture, of course, for much depended on the availability of reviewers and, certainly up to the 1980s, the willingness of the host museums to communicate their plans beyond the home audience. Above all, Spain’s whole position with regard to international exhibitions and the renewed vigour of its leading museums made for very considerable changes. The Socialist government elected in 1982 – the first for four decades – promoted a more open climate and, through an energetic Ministerio de Cultura, it encouraged philanthropic support for the arts through financial and business institutions such as the foundations of the Cajas de Ahorros. The country’s induction into the European Union in 1986 further boosted la movida – the rapid post-Franco resuscitation of the arts. Many internationally known artists soon received their first exhibitions in Spain and there was a more varied programme of historical shows, even of Spanish artists such as Juan Gris, hitherto almost invisible. With the opening in 1992 of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, works by renowned European and American old and modern masters, until then unrepresented in museums, became available to the public for the first time. The profile of contemporary art made a leap with the inauguration in 1982 of ARCO, the big annual Madrid fair which spawned a new generation of Spanish collectors, and through the ambitious exhibitions mounted in the Palacio de Velázquez and later in the newly established Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. Swiftly Spain re-entered the mainstream that had passed it by during the Franco years. Now, while Madrid and Barcelona continue as the two cities with the highest density of museums and the most varied temporary exhibitions, museums and art centres elsewhere are flourishing. Bilbao, Valencia, La Coruña, Seville (with its new contemporary art fair) and Málaga are firmly on the circuit, and only last month a huge museum for international contemporary art was opened in León.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest there have not been problems. Important museum posts in Spain are political appointments and this directorial musical chairs does not make for continuous stability (witness the recent ‘resignation’ of Alvaro Fernández-Villaverde, the respected president of the Patrimonio Nacional); interminable burocracia has led to a haemorrhaging of spirited curators who now can enjoy, for the most part, the comparative freedoms of museums beyond Spain; there are dangers involved in the rat-race of international shows; and it is still relatively difficult to find out about future exhibitions and events in a country where the museum press office is a comparatively recent invention and where opening and closing dates are subject to an alarming elasticity.

The current issue was planned some time ago to mark the opening of the newly expanded Museo del Prado. In spite of tremendous visible progress, this has been put back another year, although the announcement of this delay was almost a family secret. This does, however, give us time to deepen scholarly connections with Spain and appeal for articles to make next year’s Spanish issue even more representative: we would particularly welcome articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish sculpture (a subject reignited in these pages with the publication of the St John of the Cross acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington; see pp.304–09); art in Spain between the death of Goya and the surge of modernisme in Barcelona; and on Hispanic architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of scholarship on the great names of Spanish art, the Burlington has many reasons to be proud, including its early publication of a monograph on Spanish art (1927), its pioneering, if slim, post-War special issue (December 1945) with articles on El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez and Goya and the issue devoted to the latter artist in 1964. There has been something of a speciality in articles on visitors to Spain – from the pioneering 1942 account of Richard Ford in Seville by Brinsley Ford to the study of J.F. Lewis in this issue (pp.310–15). For over sixty years, one contributor on Spanish art has proved outstanding. The special issue of February 1990 was dedicated to Enriqueta Harris, then in her eightieth year. It is with the warmest gratitude that we again salute her here, sixty-seven years after the appearance of her first contribution, a fundamental account of El Greco’s decorations for the chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad in Illescas.