For further discussion, see Spanish literature. Theatre
Spain has been an important centre of world theatre since the Roman era, when playwrights such as Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a native of Córdoba, produced popular and enduring works that would exert great influence in the 16th and 17th centuries—the so-called Golden Age. Whereas medieval drama tended to be closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church, focusing on miracle and Passion plays and on religious themes, the pioneering 16th-century dramatist Juan del Encina helped revive classical theatrical forms. During this profoundly inventive period, a national theatre emerged, fuelled by the energies of artists such as Lope de Vega, Guillén de Castro, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Miguel de Cervantes.
A time of relative quiet and cultural conservatism followed, as Spanish theatre became a shadow of the French—an irony, given that Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière borrowed many themes and characters from Spanish Golden Age originals. To further the irony, it was a French dramatist and stage director, Juan de Grimaldi, who helped revive the Spanish theatre in the 1820s by both translating French plays into Spanish and commissioning new works by Spanish writers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, playwrights José Echegaray, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, and Jacinto Benavente helped elaborate this identifiably Spanish theatre, which would arguably reach its zenith in the work of Federico García Lorca. Although, as with other aspects of art and culture, the long Franco era discouraged theatrical experimentation, García Lorca’s work informed that of playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo, Antonio Gala, Adolfo Marsillach, Josep María Flotats, and Fernando Fernán Gómez. These and other writers have produced a significant body of theatrical work in Spanish as well as in other national and regional languages, such as Catalan and Basque. Most modern playwrights are active as well in other literary genres and media, such as poetry and filmmaking. Visual arts
Spain’s most important 20th-century painters and sculptors were all part of the international avant-garde. The most famous, Pablo Picasso, is considered by many to be the most influential European artist of the 20th century. Other leading figures were Juan Gris, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. Among sculptors, the best-known figure internationally was Eduardo Chillida. Among the leading artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries were the painters Antoni Tàpies, Miguel Barceló, Rafael Canogar, Manuel Millares, and Antonio Saura, along with the sculptors Pablo Serrano, Julio González, Pablo Gargallo, and Alberto Sánchez. Architecture
Antoni Gaudí was the most famous Spanish architect as well as one of the most unusual architects of the early 20th century. Through an eclectic approach, he created a unique style reminiscent of the Mudéjar, an architectural style blending Muslim and Christian design. Despite Gaudí’s posthumous prominence, during his life he had no influence outside of Spain and little influence within it. Most of Gaudí’s work was done in Barcelona. His most famous building is the unfinished Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. Spain’s leading architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—some of whom attained international renown—included Josep Lluís Sert, Eduardo Torroja, Sanz de Oiza, Ricardo Bofill, José Rafael Moneo, and Santiago Calatrava.
Gaudí, AntoniAntoni Gaudí's Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Família), Barcelona, Spain.raiwa/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Cinema
Spain’s film industry has always been small and economically fragile. A large number of the films shown in Spanish cinemas in the 21st century were imported, from other European countries and, above all, from the United States.
The Spanish film director Luis Buñuel is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Because he was in exile during the Franco regime, most of his films were made outside of Spain, first in Mexico and then in France.
The cinema suffered greatly from the censorship of the Franco regime, and it began to recover only at the end of the 1950s with the work of Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga. After 1970 a number of Spanish directors, such as Carlos Saura, Pilar Miró, Victor Erice, and Pedro Almodóvar, achieved critical success both in Spain and abroad. José Luis Garcí’s Begin the Beguine (1982) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, as did Fernando Trueba’s Belle Epoque (1992). However, Spanish films were not generally economically successful abroad, the one major exception being Almodóvar’s comedies, especially Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), and All About My Mother (1999), the last of which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. By the late 1990s a new generation of directors, benefiting from government tax incentives and increased exposure on the international film festival circuit, had begun to attract attention outside Spain. In the first years of the 21st century, intellectually ambitious ghost stories such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) emerged as a genre that easily found audiences outside the country. Amenábar’s The Sea Inside (2004) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Cultural institutions Museums
Foremost among Spain’s many art museums is the Prado Museum in Madrid, which began construction at the end of the 18th century and was completed in the early 19th century. Many of its paintings came from royal collections of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Prado also has an annex housing 19th- and early 20th-century art.
Other outstanding museums in Madrid include the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, the Joaquín Sorolla Museum, and the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum. The Queen Sofía Museum, which opened in the early 1980s and is dedicated to modern and contemporary art, houses Picasso’s famous mural Guernica, named for the Basque town bombed in 1937 by the fascists. Important museums outside the capital include the Picasso Museum and the Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona, the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, the El Greco Museum in Toledo, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca.
There are a large number of special-interest museums. Some of them are national institutions, such as the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid and the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, but many more are provincial or local institutions. There are also numerous museums attached to cathedrals and other religious institutions. Libraries and archives
Spain has some 6,500 public and private libraries. Some important ones, such as the libraries of the palatial royal monastery of El Escorial near Madrid and of the University of Salamanca, date back more than four centuries. Others are more recent, notably the National Library in Madrid, which was created in the 19th century.
Spain has a vast number of public and private archives of various sorts: local, provincial, regional, and national. The most important are the National Historical Archive in Madrid, the General Archive of the Administration in Alcalá de Henares, the Archive of the Civil War in Salamanca, the General Archives of Simancas (established in 1540), and the Royal Archives of Aragon in Barcelona. Perhaps the most important for people outside Spain is Sevilla’s Archives of the Indies, which hold an immense quantity of documentation about Spain’s former empire in the Americas. Academies and institutes
Spain’s oldest and most famous academy is the Royal Spanish Academy. Founded in 1713 under Philip V, the first Bourbon king, it was modeled on the French Academy in Paris. Its most important task is to “cultivate and set standards for the purity and elegance of the Castilian language”; since 1951 it has done this in cooperation with similar scholarly institutions in Latin American countries to promote the lexicographical corpus of Spanish in the world. As part of this work, it publishes a massive dictionary intended to be the definitive work of its kind for the language.