España de ficciónel Museo del Prado y los discursos de la Historia del Arte

Abstract

The objective of this doctoral thesis is to present a critical history about the construction of the discourses of the History of Art in Spain during the 20th and 21st centuries through the Prado Museum and the Baroque. That is why this research has revisited the experiences of the past from the present as a reflection on the tension between the narratives that have been told and those that could be told and their museographical survival, in an attempt to encompass a kaleidoscopic reality in which identity sensitivities, geography, politics, historical events and time have played a fundamental role. Because the crisis of‘ 98, the international system of interwar Europe, the relations with Latin America, the interests of Franco’s regime, the process of European integration and the Cold War or the cultural policies of democratic Spain have marked the memory of the profession and a museum –as one of its directors rightly said–“capricious and chequered in connection with our national history”. The result is a series of paradigmatic episodes regarding how the analysis of the historical, social and political dimension of the practice of art historians and of the museum in the past is essential to understand many aspects of how does the discipline work nowadays.