ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Los Pintores Íntegros exhibition curated by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963) in Madrid in 1915. While analysing the exhibition’s significance to the introduction of Cubism in the Spanish capital, it also discusses how Gómez de la Serna’s rationale contributed in asserting a primitivist bedrock for the show. Following Leighten’s insight on how an “anticolonial crisis” can be associated with the praise of African art, and taking into consideration the concurrent pluralisation of the political, historical and aesthetic implications in modernist uses of primitivism arising from there, Gómez de la Serna’s thought will be discussed along with some of the artworks showed in the 1915 exhibition, particularly those by Diego Rivera (1886–1957). As the argument hopes to demonstrate, the primitivist background of Los Pintores Íntegros paved the way for intertwining the local and the cosmopolitan not only by calling for the Europeanising of Spain via the presentation of Cubism and the inscription of Madrid in the geography of international avant-garde exhibitions but also by making the values of local folk art and popular culture interchangeable under the umbrella of Cubism. This process encompassed the Spanishisation of the Cubist repertoire presented by the “íntegros” painters just before Diego Rivera fabricated an alternative primitivist myth of origins, grounded in Mexican ethnicity and culture.
