Inaugural Lecture by Claudia Hopkins

Edinburgh College of Art is delighted to announce the inaugural lecture of Professor Claudia Hopkins ‘The Alhambra in Franco’s Spain around 1950'.

The Alhambra palace-fortress in Granada, the iconic monument of Spain’s Islamic past (Al-Andalus, 711-1492) has enjoyed a rich afterlife in the global imagination. Depending on one’s perspective, it may encapsulate Europe’s ‘Other,’ the Maghreb’s ‘lost paradise,’ or Spain’s ‘Orient within.’ It has played a crucial role in shaping both national and regional identities in Spain and has frequently been mobilized in political discourse concerning East-West relations. This lecture begins with the question of what we can learn about attitudes to the Alhambra in Franco’s Spain by focusing on art, architecture, and film around 1950, a period of political realignment. At that time the regime began to open to the West, while simultaneously attempting to maintain a protectorate in Morocco and ties to the Arab world. The Alhambra was viewed through traditional and modernist aesthetic lenses, catalyzing beliefs, aspirations, and dreams relating to colonialism, race, nation, and modernity. Two kinds of nostalgia were at play: restorative and reflective. In a broad context, how does this nostalgia recalibrate theoretical understandings of ‘Orientalism’? How important is the study of overlooked regions and frontier zones like Spain and Morocco to current calls for a ‘global’ history of art and architecture?

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

About Claudia Hopkins

Claudia Hopkins holds a Personal Chair of Art History at Edinburgh College of Art. She is Honorary Professor of Hispanic Art at Durham University, where she directed the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art between 2020 and 2023.

Her research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century visual cultures, and she is a leading expert on Spanish art. Her new book Art and Identity in Spain 1833-1956. The Orient Within (2024) examines attitudes to al-Andalus and northern Morocco in Spanish art. Previous publications include, among others, Romantic Spain. David Roberts and Genaro Pérez Villaamil (ed., 2021), which won the Jonathan Brown Award from the Society for Global Iberian Art, and the Mark A. Roglán Award from The Custard Institute at the Meadows Museum for exemplary scholarship relating to Iberian art; Hot Art, Cold War-Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 and its companion volume Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (ed. with Iain Boyd Whyte, 2020); Orientalism and Spain (ed. with Anna McSweeney, 2017).

She is also a curator. In 2009 she contributed to The Discovery of Spain. British Artists and Collectors. Goya to Picasso (National Gallery of Scotland, 2009). More recently she curated La España romántica: Genaro Pérez Villaamil y David Roberts (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, CEEH, Madrid, 2021-2022), the online platform Spanish Art in County Durham (with Andy Beresford, Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art, 2022), and Impressions of Spain in the 1830s (with Barry Ife, Maughan Library, King’s College, London, 2023).

She is Editor of Art in Translation, the flagship journal of the School of History of Art, which is funded by Edinburgh College of Art and the Getty Foundation.

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