So near and yet so far: Spain and its painters in nineteenth-century France

If one questioned a French person today about his or her artistic culture, would there be anyone who would draw a blank on Spain? Everybody, even the least erudite, would be bound to name at least one artist, be it Picasso. And then those very sonorous words, most of them never Gallicised (Goya, the Alhambra, the Escorial), as against their Italian equivalents, which to a French audience have become too close to home through the use of translation (for, in France, one says ‘Léonard de Vinci’, ‘les Chambres et les Loges de Raphaël’, ‘la Chapelle sixtine de Michel-Ange’), have preserved their exotic colouring, a whiff of Otherness. These things are archaic and yet still escape the status of ‘classics’. Objects which, despite the distance of the centuries, retain an element of the unexpected (the unconventional poses of the figures portrayed by Velázquez), of excess (the very raw realism of Ribera or Zurbarán), if not of savagery (the Black Paintings of Goya) and whose subversive power was such, in their time, that it has still not completely receded: Picasso retains intact, in the collective imagination, his status as the iconoclast par excellence. How can this still be the case?