PICTURES IN SPAIN
By STEPHEN SPENDER
BEFORE we left Minganilla—a village between Valencia and Madrid, where we were banqueted and, after the banquet, danced to by the children whilst the women without their men stood round weeping—a woman took me to her house, showed me photographs of her two sons, both on the Madrid front, and insisted on giving me half a dozen sausages, about half of all she had, because she felt certain that I would be hungry before we reached Madrid. Then we of the International Writers' Congress got into our cars, and, as my car waited for the " caravan " to start, one old beggar woman pressed forward from the crowd to ask me for some money. I was about to give her a few coppers when a boy leapt forward and exclaimed, with a passionate gesture, " No, no, give her nothing. The Spanish people do not accept charity."
This little incident lives in my mind with several others which go to impress on me what I can only call the seriousnes; of the people's movement in Spain. Another is my surprise when I saw for myself that the University City—with the Government buildings only separated from those taken by the rebels by yards—is still used as a place of learning, for in half-ruined class rooms, their walls perforated with bullets, the soldiers attend classes.
The welcome given to the International Writers' Congress, by the people of small villages, by soldiers in the trenches, by a deputation of tramway workers in Madrid, by the common people in the streets, in cafés, in barber shops, in bars, if they happened to realise that one was a member of the Congress, were all signs that the Spanish people have acquired that passion for education and popular culture which goes with a fundamental revolutionary change in a nation's life. It was our good fortune to symbolise popular culture for them, and this explains the great welcome which we received.
To me, perhaps the strangest of my impressions of Madrid was that of the interior of a great and massively built church on the outskirts of the city—looking over, I think, that part of the front which is called the Caso del Campo—where a vast collection of treasures from the palaces and churches of Madrid has been collected. The domed, gloomy, vast interior of the church, with its congregation of royal coaches, rood screens, crucifixes, candelabras, tapestries, ceramics, was like a meeting of all the centuries in a solemn fancy-dress ball, not of people but of objects. Our little party from the Congress walked round, feeling as out of place as a member of the audience on a stage set. We made M. Julien Benda sit in a royal coach, which suited him well, M. Egon Kisch looked handsome in an eighteenth-century wig, but apart from these courageous isolated attempts we did not succeed in adapting ourselves to our surroundings. Myself; I made no attempt to take the plunge back into the past. On the contrary, I thought in terms of making films of these stage properties, particularly one propaganda film, to show that the Republic cares for Spain's art treasures.
In this church all the lesser works of art from the palaces and churches of Madrid have been collected. Along the passages, in vaults and in chapels, there were placed thousands of canvases, a varied and unequal collection of ceramics, ivory crucifixes, antique watches, jewelry, fans, and in one vault so many images of saints that we could only make our way through them along the narrow gangway which they had discreetly left. Our guide explained that this vault had been the home of what Franco refers to as the " Quinta Columna " of his allies in Madrid. But some of the French writers lifted their fists in vigorous response to one Saint Anthony, whose clenched hand was raised in an eternal " Saha." There are traitors in both camps.
Everything in this collection was catalogued, giving the name of the palace or church from which it was taken, as well as its number in the depositary. Among the pictures cata- logued here and in the cellars of Madrid, taken from private collections, are 27 Grecos, eight Rubens, 13 Zurbaranes, 51 Goyas, nine Titians, six Tintorettos, six Tiepolos, &c. Many pictures and many valuable first editions and manuscripts have now been brought to light for the first time.
Other pictures and treasures are in bomb-proof and damp-proof cellars of Madrid. The pictures from the Prado are in the vaults and cellars of Valencia, each of them packed so as to protect it from the damp. I was assured by members of the Government that nothing from these collections has been destroyed or (as has been said) given to the Russian Government in exchange for aeroplanes. The only pictures going abroad are those lent to Paris for the Exhibition of Spanish Art. I saw some of the pictures that are soon to be shown in Paris in the chapel of a seminary at Valencia. The chapel itself was strongly built, but the main arches under which the pictures lay in packing cases had been further strengthened by piles of sandbags placed above pillars of reinforced concrete.
It is true that at the beginning of the Civil War anarchists burned churches and buildings in Spain which they saw not as things of beauty but as symbols of tyranny and super- stition. Yet even in these early days, they removed and collected the treasures of art from the churches, which have been saved. Maria Theresa Leon, the wife of the great poet Rafael Alberti, told me that when the Government made an appeal that art treasures should be saved, they were embarrassed by the quantity of stuff, some of it good, some trash, which was brought to them. Naively and eagerly the people look on the art treasures of Spain as their own heritage. The spirit in which, during a terrible siege, under bombard- ments, in a time of penury and hunger, the Junta del Tesoro Artistico in Madrid collected and arranged and catalogued meticulously the objects which we saw in that great church shows the same seriousness as that of the boy who passionately forbade me to give money to a beggar, as that of the women in Minganilla who received us with tears and asked one of us to speak to them in Spanish, just to show that we understood their fate (suerte). A people who speak in the language of war and armaments are looking ahead a month, perhaps a year, to victory. But a people who educate the soldiers in the trenches, who collect the art treasures of the nation because they have become the concern of the whole democracy, are looking forward not a month or a year, but to a future in which whole generations are liberated not by guns, but by the great tradition of Spanish painting and literature.
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