ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolving roles of art within the development of a local political process. The earliest successful organizers of Basque nationalism were members of the petite bourgeoisie who correctly perceived the rapid industrialization of their country in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a real threat both to their position within local society and to the traditional way of rural life. The rise of the coal, iron-and-steel-making, and shipbuilding industries together with the movement of villagers into the towns and the mass immigration of non-Basque Spaniards looking for jobs helped create an emerging society in which customary values did not hold as much sway as before. One beneficial consequence of this sort of painting, as far as nationalists were concerned, was that the nationality of the painter was patent. Anthropologists are not only commentators on social lives, they are participants in them as well.
