ABSTRACT
In the immediate years after the Second World War, Spain was initially an unwelcoming territory for art from the United States. Franco's regime initially adopted a policy of autarky, and official attitudes to American culture were negative. The political US-Spanish rapprochement in the early 1950s helped facilitate the arrival of modern American art in Spain, but the success of American art in the Peninsula must also be understood in relation to a shift in Franco's cultural policies in support of Spanish avant-garde artists. Listed in the catalog in alphabetical order, the participating US artists were fully integrated into a vast panorama of Spanish, North and South American artists, all under the auspices of Franco's regime. Here the work of US artists was creatively coopted by Franco's ingenious curator in order to project a modern and positive image of Spain to audiences at home and abroad.
