End Again

As fin de siglo Spain struggled with perceived decadence and decline, the visual arts reflected the debate and influenced the outcome. This volume argues that the way artists understood and depicted the concepts of degeneration and regeneration is essential to understanding the broader societal conversation and is inseparable from definitions of Spanish modernism.Oscar E. Vázquez examines how painting, sculpture, drawing, and popular illustrated materials approached “endings” and “beginnings” during the Bourbon monarchy’s restoration. Throughout this period, people inside and outside the art world came to associate degeneration with certain types of artistic productions, spaces, and human bodies, imbuing them with backwardness, violence, criminality, and disease. Pictorial representations contributed to this understanding that specific things, actions, attitudes, and ways of being were degenerative and backward or, alternatively, regenerative and modern. Vázquez explores the significance of these disparate perceptions and how their visual representations reflected Spanish national identity and modernism.An in-depth study of the ideas of degeneration and regeneration in modernist Spain, The End Again is an insightful look at how art can affect the social and cultural debates at the heart of a nation.

“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, “The End Again presents a rich body of new material on Spanish art and visual culture. By placing this work in conversation with the fields of medicine, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and criminology, Oscar Vázquez broadens our understanding of how the concept of degeneration functioned in Spain and, by extension, Europe more broadly at the turn of the twentieth century. I love this book!”—M. Elizabeth Boone, author of Vistas de España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860–1914, “In addition to the book’s usefulness for scholars working in various disciplines, due to the lack of a textbook in English covering the history of Spanish art, The End Again will be helpful for many of us teaching outside of Spain or the Spanish-speaking Americas.”—Miriam Margarita Basilio, Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies

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.