Salamanca Episode 3

There were two other notable specific places we visited in Salamanca, that I would recommend, in addition to randomly roaming around.

1. The first was Casa Lisa, a museum sandwiched into the old city wall near the river, the Museo Art Nouveau and Art Deco, with a collection dating from the last decades of the 19th century to World War II.

The Museum is a mansion built between 1897 and 1905 for its first owner, Miguel de Lis. He had a tannery which he had inherited from his father and he had the financial wherewithal to build a beautiful modernist house for his family and his collections. As I love both Art Nouveau and Art Deco, that was a must-see for me. This was considered “new art” around the beginning of the 1900s and had different names in different countries - in Spain it was called Modernism, in France Art Nouveau, in Austria Sezessión Viennese (Secession of Vienna), in Italy Liberty or in Germany Jugendstil.

Though Casa Lis eventually became derelict under subsequent owners, it was photographed around 1908 which provided a guide to its reconstruction. There were large reprints of the original photographs in one room, these two showing the owner and his wife and she with friends. When in the early eighties, the City Council of Salamanca acquired Casa Lis, nothing of the original decoration remained - furniture stained glass windows, sculptures, fabrics... everything had disappeared over the years as the house was occupied by other tenants or owners.

I believe all these wonderful exhibits have been all acquired since. We were told that no photos were allowed - odd because you are allowed to take photos without flash in almost every museum and art gallery now - but I sneaked in a few.

The building was gorgeous with stained glass windows of the galleries on the river side, a huge central skylight of stained glass over what used to be an open patio, and tiled floors as were the collections beautifully displayed in categories in various rooms - from paintings to bronzes and other sculptures to furniture to Lalique glass to jewellery to a huge doll collection. Each room had some appropriate music as well to set the mood.

And there was a lovely cafe where we had some refreshment - including the best chocolate cake ever! The coffee machine was a work of art too.

Casa Lis looked beautiful at night too.

2. The second thing we did was to go to the nearby Spanish Civil War Museum. I spent our last trip in Spain reading a book about this terrible war and ensuing dictatorship, and in light of what what we are reading in the news, it seemed a good time to tour this small museum. Unfortunately, the detailed exhibit explanations were not in English but we were given a laminated card that gave some basic information about the exhibits.

Of interest were various propaganda posters for both the Nationalists and Republicans.

And there was the famous 1936 photograph called The Falling Soldier that made American war photographer Robert Capa’s career, purportedly capturing the moment of a soldier’s death during the Civil War. There is controversy over whether this was really the case, which you can read about here if interested. It is thought to have taken place near the small hilltop town of Espejo, identified as such by the mountains in the background. We spent a night in Espejo last year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/arts/design/18capa.html

There was an amazing piece of art by Robert Silvers who in 2001 recreated Picasso’s Guernica as a mural made entirely with photographs from the Spanish Civil War, reimagining the painting by Pablo Picasso which he created for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, commissioned by the Republican government. It depicts the bombing of the city of Guernica on April 26, 1937. As a result of this attack—carried out by the German Condor Legion—the city center was completely destroyed, and the death toll rose to approximately three thousand. A photo of this work of course is almost pointless. You could get up close to it though and see these tiny photographs or sections of photographs, all the same size that he had collaged together to recreate this famous painting. There were also interesting photographs showing the various stages of Picasso’s painting as he worked on it.

There was also a “recreation” of a Masonic meeting room as the Nationalists (Franco’s Falange fascist party) depicted it - with hoods, skulls, etc. - in order to demonize the Masonic Orders. I did not remember this from the history I read, but I learned more, as summarized below, from this site:

https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/03/15/inenglish/1458030657_636841.html

In 1936, when Franco launched his uprising that led to the civil war, he made the 6,000 or so freemasons in Spain one of his prime targets, along with communists. In 1940, after the war, the Law for the Suppression of Freemasonry and Communism was passed, which became the legal instrument to pursue repression. Freemasons have always been associated with anti-clericalism and liberalism, both anathemas to Franco, who Nationaists were closely aligned with and supported by the Catholic Church. During the immediate post-Civil War repression, an estimated 10,000 Spaniards were shot for simply being freemasons and many more were imprisoned and had their property seized.

During his 40-year dictatorship, Franco was fond of referring to the “Jewish-Masonic conspiracy,” even doing so in his final speech, given from the balcony of the Royal Palace in September 1975, less than two months before his death. With the dictator out of the way, Spain began its slow transition toward democracy, as political parties, labor unions, and religious movements were all legalized and civil rights restored. All except for the freemasons, that is, who had to wait until 1979 to be legalized, and only then after the High Court had overruled the Interior Ministry’s initial refusal to allow them to be registered.

Franco, a devout Catholic, was not alone in his mistrust of the freemasons: in 2005, Pope Benedict described masonry as a sin; and interestingly enough, his successor, Pope Francis shares this view, despite his liberal tendencies. “On this earth toward the end of the 19th century, the conditions for the growth of young people were dreadful. This region was filled with masons, priest-haters, anti-clericalists, and Satanists,” declared the Argentinean pontiff at a meeting of young Catholics in Turin last September.” Wow! History is always with us. Seems to me that Trump’s recent speech to the US Justice Dept. is Franco-thought re-imagined but Franco could at least speak in complete sentences.

A few more cheerful, random shots in Salamanca.