The Art Of Spain (2008) s01e03 Episode Script

Travelling through the north of Spain feels like visiting another country, and in some ways it is.
Many people who live here don't feel Spanish.
And even speak a different language.
In the 20th Century, this feeling of difference would break out into violence, revolution and war.
And out of this conflict would explode some of the most astonishing modern art ever seen.
Primal, vivid and often violent.
The story of Northern Spain is crucial to the whole history of modern art.
I'll be travelling through its physical landscape but what I'm really interested in is its psychological landscape.
A dark, troubling place, but one that's lit up by wonderful flashes of wild humour.
It's a journey that leads to the darkest and the most fascinating recesses of the Spanish imagination.
My journey starts here - Fuendetodos - a one-horse town in the heart of Aragon in the north-east of Spain.
Nothing about this sleepy village says much about the man who was born here in 1746.
His name was Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.
And he completely reframed the way in which we see the world.
He asked totally new questions about what it means to be a human being, with profound and shocking results.
Goya spent his youth painting light-hearted decorative pictures for the Spanish Court.
As well as a series of celebrated portraits of his royal masters.
But almost overnight his art metamorphosed into something dark and strange.
It's this work that fascinates me, and it why he's now known as one of the fathers of modern art.
In 1792 a mysterious, near fatal illness left Goya completely deaf.
And he retreated from the revelry and decadence of the Spanish court into his own imagination.
The result was a far darker style - nightmarish, grotesque, increasingly pessimistic.
Goya was born in this house in 1746.
Almost 60 years later, war ravaged his beloved Aragon.
In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain.
The French army vastly outnumbered their opponents.
The Spanish response was a new kind of guerrilla warfare that relied on ambush and surprise.
The conflict that resulted was without rules, chivalry or honour.
Women and children were murdered, there was mass rape, and corpses were mutilated.
And Goya saw it all.
Goya's response was a series of 85 etchings known as the Disasters of War, which were considered too dark and desolate to be published in his own lifetime.
One of the things that's brilliant about them is that Goya has taken the medium of the etching, the portfolio that you leaf through, that traditionally connoisseurs of art would hand around at the dinner table.
He's taken that and given you the last thing you want to look at.
What you get is this terrible sense of building, growing atrocity.
As if Goya's saying, "How bad can it get? You think that it can't get any worse? "I'll show you worse.
Look at this.
"This is still worse", he writes.
In some ways the most revealing image is the very first.
We see in an image that immediately evokes the religious certainties of the Christian past.
It's a man on his knees with his arms outspread, and you think this looks like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
But no, it's not.
It's just an old man with a torn shirt, kneeling in a dark landscape.
And I think that's Goya's way of saying the darkest thing of all.
Saying that God is dead.
There is no salvation - justjust darkness.
In the Disasters of War, Goya had invented a completely new art for a new age of doubt.
But he was going to venture even further into the void.
Deaf, bereft of God, and convinced of man's inhumanity, he withdrew from the world.
He moved into an isolated house in a forest outside Madrid.
And directly onto its walls, he painted an extraordinary expression of his despair.
They are known as the Black Paintings.
Black in subject matter and black in colour.
They are full of nightmarish visions of witches, frenzied violence and devil worship.
The Black Paintings are Goya's most deeply disenchanted pictures, taking art itself into completely new, uncharted territory.
Nobody really knows why Goya painted the Black paintings, and nobody really knows what they mean.
But then, that's part of their significance.
This is painting taken to the brink of incoherence.
Goya paints a dog, and suggests that perhaps that's all that life amounts to in the end.
That's all we are - a dog barking into the void.
The Black Paintings have only survived because they were painstakingly transferred to canvas 70 years after Goya's death.
He never tried to exhibit them, or even preserve them.
You get the feeling he painted the Black Paintings for himself, and himself alone - an audience of one.
Look at this! Two men up to their knees in some kind of primeval sludge, smashing the hell out of each of each other with wooden cudgels.
You've got the sense that this is just going to go on forever.
That that's what life is, men killing each other.
There's this feeling that everything's fallen to bits.
Life is meaningless, the last one out, please turn all the lights off.
How dark can painting get? This is a picture of a pilgrimage procession, butit's as if the lunatics have got out of the asylum.
Look at these faces! He's almost deliberately stopped being able to paint so that the faces They've been twisted.
It's like clay formed by a child.
You can imagine the eyes are made by sticking your fingers in.
But look over here.
This is my favourite painting of the lot.
It's the darkest of them all, but I think the mood has suddenly lightened.
It's Saturn devouring his own child, arrghm! Taking this bite out of that bloody corpse.
But it's got this orgiastic energy.
It's as if Goya's saying, "Well, if everything's so black, "let's turn it into a carnival of death and gloom and despair.
" The mad staring eyes.
And what's extraordinary is that he hung this picture on the wall of his dining room.
This is what he looked at while he was eating his dinner! Soon after he completed the Black Paintings, Goya's sight deteriorated to the point where he could barely see.
Within five years he was dead.
Goya may have lit the fuse of modern art but the painters who came after him didn't follow his lead.
And artistically speaking, Spain went to sleep for the best part of 50 years - the longest siesta in history.
It's as if Goya's successors couldn't bear to peer into the abyss that he'd opened up.
They painted picturesque peasants toiling happily in the fields or dancing at fiesta time.
And boy, was their work boring! It wasn't until the start of the 20th century that the gauntlet thrown down by Goya was finally picked up, and Spain became one of the real powerhouses of modern art.
But modern art was to take a very particular course in Spain.
In a country steeped in fervent Catholicism, the doubt of the Modern age, Goya's doubt, would constantly come up against the old beliefs and superstitions.
Spanish modern art would be forged out of the friction between these two opposites - modern atheism, ancient religion.
This story was shaped here in Barcelona, in Catalunya in the north-east of Spain.
During the early years of the 20th century, the city was undergoing an economic boom.
The people of Catalunya wanted to declare their own sense of identity and independence from Madrid, the centre of government.
The man whose work exemplified Barcelona's spirit of exuberance at the start of the 20th Century was the architect, Antoni Gaudi.
His wonderful Parc Guell is like a permanent festive firework display with it serpentine forms and bright mosaics.
Gaudi was the first great artist to emerge in Spain since Goya.
But he was very much Goya's opposite.
His work shouts "Yes!" to the world with its organic, sexy shapes and its carnival spirit.
But Gaudi's style itself - organic, sinuous, growing out of the Catalunyan soil - was also directly inspired by God's natural world.
Unlike Goya, who had assaulted religion, Gaudi was a man who clung to the certainties of Spain's Catholic past.
His most famous building, one which he spent almost his whole life failing to complete, was a cathedral - The Sagrada Familia.
The silhouette of Gaudi's great cathedral still looms large over the modern cityscape of Barcelona.
And seen from you a distance, you can really sense the spiritual aspiration that lies behind it.
It almost looks like the fingers of a human hand reaching up towards the heavens, towards the God that Goya had denied.
Gaudi saw himself as God's architect, and it was to God that he looked for inspiration.
But the Sagrada Familia was to be a deeply troubled project.
Even as Gaudi was building it, the religious climate in Barcelona was changing.
New ideas began to undermine the ancient traditions of the Spanish Church.
Funds for his great Catholic cathedral became ever harder to come by, and the building remained incomplete at his death.
From somewhere like here, you get Gaudi's original designs and nothing else.
And this park is a particularly good place to look at it from.
And in fact you get double your value for money - you get the building's reflection in water as well.
And I think that takes you to the heart of what Gaudi wanted from it.
He wanted this to look like a cathedral that had grown, almost like a stalagmite growing from the floor of a cave, rather than something that had actually been built.
I like Salvador Dali's idea, who said that the whole thing should have been left as it was when Gaudi died, and they should have simply placed a huge glass bell jar over it.
Sadly, they're doing the opposite.
Since the architect's death, work on the Sagrada Familia has trundled on.
Nowadays, the cathedral is funded mainly by Japanese businessmen obsessed by Gaudi.
The results, however, are more Disneyland than anything else.
The sad truth is that the Sagrada Familia is being ruined day by day by the very efforts of those who claim to be completing it.
With its vile accumulations of kitsch statuary and its pastiches of Gaudi's original mosaic decoration, it's in danger of turning in to no more than Europe's largest and most cynical job creation scheme.
It's not that Gaudi wasn't one of the very greatest architects of the 20th century, it's just that if you want to understand why, you have to go elsewhere.
Looking forward to this.
This is the flat of Carmen.
Hello! Hello, Carmen, it's Andrew.
I've got some flowers for you.
Thank you.
May we come in? Yes.
Come in, come in, and do whatever It's ironic that you get the strongest sense of Gaudi's spirituality and optimism, not from his religious architecture, but from a block of flats he designed in the first decade of the 20th century.
La Pedrera, or the Stone Quarry, inspires a real sense of awe and wonder that's missing from the Sagrada Familia.
Carmen has lived in the building for the best part of 60 years.
She's still utterly devoted to the place, and still in love with the architect who created it.
This is for you.
Thank you.
And this is for me.
Gaudi built the building for private families.
So every bedroom has next to the bedroom, the bathroom.
Always.
And it is, when I show you the flat you will see that it is absolutely comfortable and useful.
Those are words, it's interesting, because Gaudi, like many modern architects, some people think, well, it's very beautiful, but you couldn't live in it, it's not nice to live in.
No, no.
Do you still love living here as much as when you started? Si, si.
He may have been dead for more than 80 years but Gaudi keeps Carmen very busy indeed.
You have not closed the door of the lift! Always the same! Always! I am ashamed! It's gone down now.
I am ashamed! Because always that camp.
Tourists, friends of mine, always leave the door of the lift badlyclosed.
I didn't close it properly.
I think it's gone down.
Sorry.
Would you mind if we walked around the flat a bit? Yes.
So what do you call this room? This is the living room.
This is the living room.
The floor is traditional.
Of course I have not polished it but it is original.
And can you see the ceilings? Look - faith! The cross.
Land, the Catalan flag.
Love.
The heart.
Isn't that beautiful? And what is that in the middle? The sun? No.
Just nice.
Just a beautiful thing.
Oh yes, it is beautiful.
It's very welcoming of light, this house.
There's always light.
In every room.
The sun is an inhabitant in this house.
The sun lives in your house? Yes, the sun lives here.
I love that! Being with Carmen I couldn't help feeling like a schoolboy who's been called to see the headmistress.
So when she said we had to go downstairs to look at something else, I wasn't about to argue.
I live number seven.
We shall go to the first.
One flat below.
You will see the difference! Close the door, please.
Sorry, yes.
And look at the sculptures up the top.
Look at the sculptures! Like Henry Moore! It IS like Henry Moore! Like Henry Moore.
Modern, look, modern sculpture.
And here it says "Ave", "Ave".
And here it says "Ave Maria".
Because Gaudi was very fond of Our Lady.
Yeah.
Carmen certainly knows Gaudi inside out, and she was dead right when she mentioned Henry Moore.
If you look at the exterior of the building, you can see how Gaudi's achievement went far beyond architecture alone.
I think that he reinvented the entire language of 20th Century sculpture.
These balconies are astonishing, with their tangle of abstract forms.
And the roof of La Pedrera, well! These chimneys anticipate not just Henry Moore's sinuous, organic sculptures, but also the whole movement towards the primitive during the 20th Century.
All of modern art is here.
It's a paradox that Gaudi, an artist so wedded to the Catholic past, should have invented the art of the future.
He embraced celibacy, yet his buildings, with their phallic towers their womb-like openings, are seething with sexual suggestion.
Now the same tension between spirituality and sexuality would drive the life and work of Gaudi's most famous admirer - Pablo Picasso.
Picasso moved to Barcelona with his family when he was 14 years old, and he always said that he had his first sexual experience here in the city's red light district.
Now carnal experience, carnal knowledge, were always central to his art.
He once said that he wanted to paint a woman who seemed so real you could smell her as well as touch her.
I think that Barcelona's whores and whorehouses always loomed large in his imagination.
Barcelona gave Picasso the subject to which he would obsessively return.
Even though he was to spend most of his adult life in France, he remained devoted, like a lover, to the sexy memories of the city that had first inspired him.
This is the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
But it's a Picasso Museum like no other, because it was shaped by the artist himself.
Towards the end of his life, he gave a remarkable collection of his own work to the city that had first sparked his extraordinary career.
And I think if you read his own selection of works as a kind of coded message, you can see this whole place as a sort of confession chamber in which Picasso set out to show Spain that he himself always felt Spanish to the core.
What's intriguing about this collection, for me, is the sheer weight of religious works that it contains.
Look at all these studies for religious pictures.
And look at this wonderful crucifixion.
Again, it's done when he was just 15, 16 years old.
It reminds me of Picasso's remark that he could draw like one of the old masters of the Renaissance when he was 15 and he spent the rest of his life learning to draw like a five year-old.
But that religious theme, that deep Spanish Catholicism at the heart of Picasso's young life, is very much the theme, if you like, the coded message of this collection.
And it reaches a kind of early climax in this picture of The First Communion.
And while he can't exactly be described as a religious man for the rest of his life, this womanising bohemian, I think that what he's telling us in this museum is that he never really loses his attachment to a profoundly superstitious way of thinking about the world.
If you take that message to heart, as I think Picasso meant you to, all of his work suddenly looks rather different.
Think of Cubism.
It's often said to be the coldest, most rational phase of Picasso's art.
An attempt to depict objects as you see them when you walk round them.
But, think of Cubism from a religious perspective, and isn't it an attempt to do what the painters of old Catholic Spain had done? To make people and objects hover and shimmer, like things seen in a vision.
To make the air itself crackle with spiritual electricity.
Even his most famous painting, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, based, despite its name, on an experience in a Barcelona brothel, is soaked in memories of the Catholic past.
The angular style may seem fiercely modern.
And the terrifying female faces with staring eyes draw inspiration from African masks.
But still, the painting presents us with an ancient Christian theme.
A man tempted by fiends and demons in sexual form.
A modern version of the temptation of St Anthony.
A subject painted by generations of Spanish Catholic artists.
I really think you can't understand Picasso unless you understand that he ALWAYS remains wedded to a particular, very deep and Spanish sense of the superstitious powers of art.
And I think he's a man who spent his whole life The whole Picasso project, if you like, can be explained by his desire to re-enchant the landscape of the modern world, to re-enchant modern art, to give it these figures with staring eyes, to give it some of that power of the ancient superstitious images of the Catholic past.
And here you've got Picasso, completely the Spanish Picasso, taking on the greatest ghost of the Spanish past - this is his version of Velazquez's Las Meninas, the single most famous Spanish painting of all.
Painted from the sitter's point of view, Velazquez's masterpiece turned the traditional royal portrait on its head.
What has Picasso done with it? He's turned it into something completely different.
It's become a huge, strange, phallic celebration of the power of the artist himself.
There he is, wielding his paintbrush.
This is not Velazquez, it's Picasso.
And Picasso is a great totem pole erected phallically in the centre of the picture.
He's turned himself into the image of the God he spent his whole life looking for.
E bien, C'est fini.
Spanish modern art's so rich, you get the feeling that anything could have grown on Barcelona's fertile ground during the early years of the 20th century.
And in fact, Catalunya saw itself, both mythically and literally, as a kind of Eden.
Catalunya is one of the most fertile parts of Spain.
It's a very important part of the Catalunyan sense of identity that you should never lose touch with your roots in that landscape.
And that's why, for me, the market takes you to the beating heart of Barcelona.
Because it's here that you come to see, to enjoy, to taste, all the bounty of that Catalunyan landscape that lies beyond the city.
This place is all about life, colour, engagement with experience.
The Spanish have a word for it, "allegria".
"Joie de vivre" it would be in France.
It's why my favourite Catalan proverb is very straightforward.
It simply goes "Eat well, shit strongly, and you need have no fear of death".
The final member of Barcelona's great trio of modern artists was, above all, a painter of allegria.
A man whose whole being was bound up with the notion of Catalunya as a Garden of Eden.
His name was Joan Miro.
His museum is high in the clouds overlooking Barcelona.
Fitting, because it really is a chamber of dreams and fantasies.
And all of them rooted in Miro's memories of his childhood home.
Miro was profoundly attached to the place that he was born, Montroig in rural Catalunya, which, I think, when he was a child, he felt that this was a place charged with a sense of wonder.
Even when he travelled to Paris to find out all about modern art, to become a modern artist, it's said that he actually took earth and grass from the soil of his village and put it in his suitcase.
And some of these early pictures of Montroig - this is a beautiful example - they're his depictions of where he came from.
And it's as if he's painted every building of the village with an intense hyper-real attention to detail.
Every blade of grass, every patch of earth.
It's almost as if these pictures were another way of taking Montroig and being able to roll it up and put it in his suitcase.
Take it with him on his travels.
All his life Miro saw the soil of Catalunya as his own vision of Paradise.
And even after he moved to Paris in 1920, his art looked back to his idyllic youth growing up in Catalunya.
One of the things that sets Miro apart is the way he manages to preserve a childlike, innocent sense of wonder.
This is one of his Constellation pictures, and I think it exactly captures that childhood experience of lying on your back, staring up at the summer night sky full of stars, and trying to imagine what shapes, what forms, what patterns might lie in that constellation.
He uses the language of children's art in a very interesting way.
To me it's as if Miro looks at the world through both ends of a telescope.
On the one hand he captures the cosmic grandeur of nature.
But on the other hand it seems to me that he's fascinated by, you could say, pond life.
He's fascinated by how much existence, amoebic, strange creepy-crawly existence, might be there teeming in a single drop of water.
I think that this is what a picture like this is about.
What's interesting, what connects the two is I think whether he's looking up or looking down and in, he always finds these strange, wonky creatures.
To me they're very much like his version of angels.
Where Picasso had treated sex with a kind of religious intensity, Miro found his own holiness in images drawn from landscape.
And here, outside the building, he placed a kind of earth goddess.
Like a guardian angel forever watching over the city.
When you think back to what happened here in Spain during the early part of the 20th century, it really was extraordinary.
You've got Gaudi, who's reinvented the language of architecture.
You've got Picasso who's totally transformed painting and sculpture.
And I can't help thinking, well, why? Why is it that when I think about the great modern artists, it's the Spanish that I want to go to? I want to go to these guys, I want to go to Picasso.
Their work feels as fresh now as it was when they created it.
But why? I wonder if it isn't because here in Spain they never lost that deep conviction that for a work of art to really get you and keep you fascinated, it's got to have a sense of the mysterious.
The decline of religion didn't mean that Spanish art was stripped of its mystical power.
It just meant that artists looked elsewhere for spiritual nourishment.
Psychoanalysis claims to offer its disciples self-knowledge and answers to life's big questions.
Surrealism was the great artistic movement to explore these ideas of the unconscious, the irrational and the world of dreams.
And in Spain, the greatest Surrealist painter would find in this new territory of the mind the mythic power of the Scriptures.
I'm travelling north up the coast from Barcelona to the little town of Cadaques, through this remarkable coastal landscape, full of clefts, ravines and gullies.
Little suggestions of the human body.
And that's appropriate because this is the landscape that inspired none other than the great Surrealist and all round showman, Salvador Dali.
Dali's called his pictures "hand-painted dream photographs", but I also think they're like the sermons of some hellfire preacher.
In his most famous early work, The Persistence of Memory, there's the sense of time standing still, as it does in dreams.
But also a fanatical preoccupation with death.
That tragic puddle of flesh, Dali's own self-portrait, is his way of saying that we're all doomed to rot in the grave.
Ants, symbolising corruption, crawl over the casing of a pocket watch.
Solid objects melt like cheese.
Dali actually said his inspiration was a plate of over-ripe Camembert.
People are as subject to decay as the food they eat.
The Catalunyans have always famously been obsessed by food and Salvador Dali was no exception.
This was his favourite restaurant in Cadaques.
And the wonderful thing about it is that if you order a selection of his favourite things to eat, what you end up with are the raw materials for a Salvador Dali painting.
Except it's one that you can eat, and that's exactly what I intend to do.
Dali's endless clowning around is revealing.
It's as if his own youthful visions were so sharp and morbid that he spent the rest of his life shying away from them.
That tension between genius and self-parody lies at the heart of the bread and egg-encrusted building that he erected in his birthplace of Figueres.
Both museum, and a zany burial place.
Dali himself is buried under the floor and this really is just a gigantic, kitsch mausoleum to the degraded memory of what Surrealism had once been.
With its huge theatrical pastiches, its Liberace fag-end papier-mache Surrealist objects, its absurd waxen Christ, it's almost as if he's emasculated himself, held up his own testicles and said, "Look, this is how bad I can really be!" This is the Mae West apartment.
Look, all the images resolve into the face of Mae West.
Fantastically clever.
Dali claimed that his museum was the world's largest Surrealist object.
But the trouble is that it isn't actually very surreal at all, in the sense of being genuinely disturbing.
It's more like a giant amusement arcade.
There's a car where it rains on the inside, but only if you throw in a coin.
The truth is that, although Dali was, briefly, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, he'd lost the plot as early as the 1940s.
And by the '70s, he was doing adverts for Alka-Seltzer.
First, it dissolves.
Then the Alka-Seltzer shoots into the stomach! Here it neutralises that bad excess acid and those beautiful places will be beautiful again.
Alka Seltzer is a work of art, like Dali! And yet, and yet, and yet, tucked away in this rather obscure corner of Dali's architectural orgy of self-hatred, there's a remarkable shrine to his genuine genius as a young man.
If I had to choose one picture out of those assembled here, it would be this one, The Spectre of Sex Appeal, which he painted in 1934 absolutely at the mid-point of his brief, golden moment of inspiration.
It shows us a young boy, perhaps Dali's memory of himself as a young boy, contemplating this strange image of female sexuality.
As so often in Dali, sex, death and food are all combined.
The figure is made out of blood, bones, flesh and bizarrely, sausages.
If we think of the 20th century as the great century of self-obsession, self-exploration, as the century of the Self, you think of Jung, you think of Freud, who actually admired Dali although he found him, "A very annoying young man," he said.
You have to say that the great poet of that century of self-exploration was Salvador Dali.
He gave us the language of dreams.
During the 1930s Dali had fast become a controversial figure.
Spain had become increasingly split by a political struggle between the Communist left and the Fascist right.
Dali himself was kicked out of the Surrealists for having suspected Fascist sympathies, or at least for not being Communist enough for the rest of the group.
Despite these accusations, he was to create a work of art that would sum up the gathering storm soon to engulf his homeland.
It's called Premonition of a Civil War, Soft Construction in Boiled Beans.
Spain is seen to be ripping its own body apart, strangling the life out of itself.
In 1936, just six months after the completion of the picture, artistic prophecy became reality and the Civil War began.
It was a war that would tear Spain to pieces, destroying families, and leading to horrific atrocities committed by both sides.
Key battles between the Fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, and the Communist Republicans were fought out on the Aragon plains.
I've come to the town of Belchite, that was ravaged by fighting in 1937.
Left exactly as it was after the last shot was fired, it's Spain's great memorial to the disasters of modern war.
It would be insensitive to call it a work of art.
What happened here was far too bloody for that.
But I do think that it's one of the most extraordinary monuments of the 20th Century.
Between two and three thousand people died here in Belchite in the course of just 12 days, and you can still feel the violence that tore the heart out of this place in the shattered remains of its architecture.
What's really haunting is the scale.
It's a whole city preserved in the moment of its annihilation, like some 20th Century Pompeii.
But what did for this place wasn't an act of God, it was an act of war.
The Battle of Belchite was more than 70 years ago, but the wounds that it opened up have yet to heal.
Paco Naval grew up in the town, and endured the turmoil of the Civil War.
So this is the old church? Las Iglesias? Las Igles.
"There will be no more young people coming in here and you'll never hear the songs your fathers sang before.
" Paco, how old were you when the Civil War came to Belchite? 15? And what do you remember? What are your most vivid memories of what happened here? The people of this region, do you think they've recovered from the trauma of the war yet? No.
In April 1937, one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War took place.
Picasso recorded this godless act - the carpet-bombing of a northern Spanish town - in a monumental work of art.
Guernica.
Yet again, Picasso is drawn back to the religious past.
The painting's a great altarpiece, full of horror, but also a sense of hope and even potential salvation.
As if, even in its darkest hour, Picasso believed that his beloved Spain might one day be saved from Franco and his devils.
During the Civil War, Franco had authorised a failed bombardment of the world famous Prado Museum.
I think that says a lot about his attitude towards art in general.
The fighting finally ended in 1939 with victory for Franco and the Nationalists.
By the time both sides had put down their weapons, approximately half a million people were dead.
He ruled Spain for the best part of 40 years, during which time there would be precious time room for self-expression or free-thinking.
It's not that there would be no great artists in Spain during the Franco years, it's just that they'd live in exile.
But many of these exiled artists would find new ways to express their creative visions.
Painting, in the hands of Luis Bunuel, moved off canvas and onto celluloid.
Spain's greatest film-maker was also one of art's true subversives.
He spent his childhood here in Aragon, but lived in exile for most of his life.
His work is full of savage, anarchic humour and surreal flourishes.
In 1960, Franco's regime decreed that Bunuel should be allowed to make any film he wanted on Spanish soil.
An attempt to entice artists back to Spain.
The following year Bunuel released Viridiana, climaxing with a blasphemous parody of Leonardo's Last Supper.
It wasn't the film Franco had hoped for.
Pere Portobella was the executive producer of Viridiana, and a close friend of Bunuel.
Was Bunuel straightforwardly an atheist, or was it more complicated than that? If you had to put your finger on Bunuel's single greatest ambition as a film-maker, what would it be? To understand the singular vision of this cinematic artist, you have to travel to the place where he was born.
A place, he said, where the Middle Ages lasted until World War One.
Bunuel's youth was one of blind faith and it was spent here in Calanda, in the heart of Aragon.
Bunuel was the living embodiment of everything Franco would have hated.
A radical liberal intellectual, who detested organised religion and was fascinated by the wilder extremes of human sexuality.
In fact, these three great obsessions - sex, left-wing politics and Catholicism, were all shaped by his childhood here in Calanda.
Miguel Juan Pellicer was a 17th-century inhabitant of Calanda who was run over by a cart.
And his leg was so badly damaged that it had to be amputated.
Now, Pellicer was a deeply pious man and he hobbled his way on a pilgrimage to Zaragoza, where he prayed to a famous image of the Virgin.
And he took oil from the lights that burned before that image and he rubbed it on his stump.
Now the story goes that one night in 1640, while he lay sleeping, the Virgin, attended by angels, flew down from heaven with the missing piece of his leg and attached it.
From that moment on he could walk.
The miracle of Calanda is remembered as the single most exciting thing ever to have happened in this rather sleepy town.
Bunuel's 1970 film Tristana goes to the heart of his fixation with the missing leg.
A strange mixture of intense eroticism mingled with disgust.
Every time I look at it, I can't help wondering if Bunuel's obsession wasn't his way of expressing how he felt about Spain itself.
A beautiful cripple, mutilated but still exerting a powerful hold on him.
A cripple who one day might be made whole again, though probably not by anything as miraculous as an angelic visitation.
It may not have been an act of divine intervention, but Franco's death in 1975 was certainly a huge liberation for those who had endured his 36-year rule.
More than half a million people went to see his body lying in state.
To check, so the joke went, that he really was dead.
But, although Franco was gone and Spain was once more a democracy, the nation would still be haunted by violence.
And once again, the north of the country was at the heart of the conflict.
I'm heading into the Basque country.
Now the Basques, like the Catalunyans, see themselves very much as a nation apart within Spain.
They also have their own language.
But the fight for independence here has been much bloodier.
The separatist group ETA still carries out terrorist attacks to this day.
And the sense of Spain as a nation essentially riven by conflict and violence, that's right at the heart of Basque culture.
Until the late 1990s, Bilbao was a fading industrial town with few distinguishing features.
And then in 1997, a new building broke with the past, and although it was designed by a man from America, it seemed to usher in not only a new form of architecture, but a new future for Spain and its art.
ETA were so outraged by the very idea of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim that they tried to blow up artist Jeff Koons's flower-covered Puppy sculpture in front of the museum.
The policeman who disturbed them was shot and killed by the Basque separatists.
I think the violent response to the building goes to the heart of its significance.
For the Basques, it wasn't Basque enough.
Many Spanish hated it cos it wasn't designed by a Spaniard.
But for the authorities at Bilbao, that was the point.
They wanted something that wasn't Spanish.
They wanted to get a New York architect in to put their city on the international map.
But I think that the wonderful paradox is that they ended up with something that's Spanish to the core, because Gehry's a clever bloke.
He knows his art history.
And I'm sure that when he was designing this building he had somewhere in his mind Picasso's constructions and pictures of the Cubist period.
We know because Gehry said so, that he had in his mind a picture called The Accordion Player by Picasso.
So, yes, it's a great Frank Gehry building.
But I can't help thinking - and maybe I should keep my voice down in case some of Gehry's people are listening, (it was really designed by Picasso)! The early years of the 20th century had seen the north of Spain produce some of the world's greatest painters.
But at the centre of that movement there had always been the phenomenal architecture of Gaudi.
And now at the start of the 21st century, I think it's architecture once again that holds the key to the future of Spanish art.
Santiago Calatrava is at the forefront of the new wave of Spanish architects taking the nation forward.
The building that really sums up his approach is a winery that lies in the Rioja region.
To my mind, this is the perfect end to a journey that's taken me through 1,000 years of Spanish art.
While Calatrava might have created a building that looks totally modern, it's also steeped in tradition.
I think this building's an absolute knockout and what I love about it is the way it seems to contain so much of Spain's cultural past.
Yes, it's a masterpiece of modern architecture, like a great abstract sculpture erected in the landscape.
And there is a specific reference to modernism in the shape of these Gaudi tiles.
But I also think it's extremely Moorish.
Look at the way he's used water and reflections.
That's very Arab.
You can see the entire structure as a kind of Arabesque drawn in the air.
It reminds me of Islamic calligraphy.
And look at this! It's the prow of a ship.
Looking at that I feel I'm in the presence of the ghosts of the Armada, the Conquistadors, Christopher Columbus.
There's so much of Spanish history in this one building.
And yet he's not left that history safely in the past.
He's taken it and he's sailing off into the future.
The double helix shape of the building puts me in mind of DNA, and I think that Calatrava is saying some pretty interesting things about what it can mean to be Spanish.
He's saying, "Yes, I've got Arab-Moorish ancestry.
"I'm a little bit Catalunyan, I've been Catholic.
" But he's also saying that you can put all those things together and they don't necessarily have to be in conflict.
The long, bloody history of Spain is one in which these different elements of the national character have forever been in conflict.
North versus South, Arab versus Christian, Nationalist versus Republican.
But now I think there's this new spirit of inclusiveness, and it's absolutely summed up by this building.
He's saying we can accept our differences and we can use them and, from that, there is this extraordinary new sense of possibility.