Spain: The Basque Provinces
Our highly esteemed vice-chairman Professor David Pike of the American
University of Paris has sent me a fat envelope decorated with the artistic
stamps France still produces. One reproduces a beautiful still life by the
18th-century painter Chardin. Another, by Cesar, represents a big thumb
sticking up out of a bare surface; it undoubtedly inspired the huge
monument of a foot which is proposed to build in the Paris of the West, San
Francisco. They illustrate the loss of humanism in French art since roughly
1885. Despite that loss, the ville lumiere attracted arty moths from all
over Europe, including Spain. Spain has always had a love-hate
relationship with France; artists like Picasso, who lived in France, bathed
in the light and themselves attracted other moths: art critics and wealthy
collectors.
The French fad annoyed the great Basque writer, Miguel de Unamuno,
politically a revolutionary who condemned those who imitated everything
French as garbage collectors. Which brings us back to the Guggenhein
Museum in Bilbao, designed by the American Frank Gehry. This monstrosity
which connaisseurs claim to admire has been denounced by Basque artists as
a Disney-style manifestation of cocacolonization.
Among the items sent by David Pike is information about the financing of
the museum. I assumed it was an expression of American generosity, but
amazingly no. Depressed Bilbao had received from the Spanish government
( i.e. people) $1.5 billion, of which a good chunk has gone to the
building of the museum. The Basque government will subsidize the museum's
annual $12 million budget. The contribution of the Guggenheim Museum in New
has been the loan of items in storage (thus saving space). A supreme
manifestation of colonization is that the Bilbao Museum will be
administered from New York by the Guggenheim Foundation.
The governing conservative Accion Popular overthrew the preceding
Socialist government of Spain by a drumbeat campaign against its
corruption, demonstrated conspicuously by the 1992 money-losing Seville
exhibition, which, like the Bilbao Museum, was supposed to revive a
depressed community. The Basque left is denouncing the use of public funds
for the Bilbao museum, and it would be surprising if this did not swell
into a national scandal, this one with international and more particularly
anti-American implications. It is a mud-slinging match like that between
American Republicans and Democrats.
Ronald Hilton, 11-22-97
