ABSTRACT
With his call for horizontal art history, Piotr Piotrowski proposed an analysis framework from which to decentre and deconstruct art history at large. His work has been extremely useful not just for considering the peripheral spaces’ strength and specificities (such as Central and Eastern Europe) but also for questioning the concept of Eurocentrism. Piotrowski was criticizing the implicit homogenization of Europe in this conceptual construct for a long time used in postcolonial thought.
This contribution addresses Piotrowski’s proposal for horizontal art history from the perspective of the Spanish case during the Francoist dictatorship. Its position—being an undeniable part of Europe, but functioning nevertheless as an exotic anomaly—responds well to Piotrowski’s concept of “close other(s)”. Going beyond the mere Spanish territory, this research also includes the Spanish diaspora and its intermediate places of exile, such as France and Latin America, to address their role in the process-building of modern art.
Understanding the Spanish case as a part of a pluricultural and polycentric West, defined by the encounters and exchanges of multiple cultures (following Piotrowski’s thought), this chapter questions centre–periphery dichotomies and brings to light the transcultural and multivalent processes that the development of modernity and postmodernity entailed.
