A Curatorial Research Micro-Internship with the National Trust Partnership June 2024
At the end of my second year as an undergraduate studying Spanish at Oxford I was lucky enough to take part in the Micro-Internship with the National Trust Partnership. The five day, online project had me researching around The Spanish Gallery at Dudmaston Hall. I learnt all about the British Ambassador to Madrid, Sir George Labouchere, who worked with the oppressive Franco regime that controlled Spain at the time. Interestingly, his gallery is full of artists who were known to rebel against the dictator Franco, so in my written research report I included various examples of the rebellions carried out by Spanish artists like Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Antonie Clavé, and Manolo Millares.
A lot of these rebellions took the form of art, such as Saura’s ‘Clandestine Caricatures’ or Clavé’s Catalunian propaganda posters, and while I found that the visual arts could communicate feelings of anger and frustration without words very effectively, I was lucky that I could make use of my language skills for this project, and even end up translating a collection of useful sources from Spanish into English. As this was a remote experience, being able to access a wider collection of online sources was a great help, and meant that I could include information from modern-day Spanish news articles about recent exhibitions of the artists, book chapters written by the artists’ children or even an interview with Sir George published in 1960s Spain.
What really interested me throughout this project was the conflict between the public and the private. This was created by the oppression of the Franco Regime, which prevented many of the artists from speaking out publicly for fear of imprisonment or execution. This also meant that the expression of their discontent was largely relegated to more private artistic forms which are only just being seen in exhibitions recently. I managed to find some of these, and it surprised me how expressive Saura’s caricatures were, for example, despite them being simply ink and paper, black and white. Compared to his more frequent use of large scale and oil on canvas, the intimacy of his private rebellion is quite striking. In the same vein, I was able to find documents concerning Sir George’s time as a diplomat in Madrid, suggesting that public words on the state of Spain, published in a Spanish newspaper, at the time did not reflect private sentiments shared with the Home Office.
These ‘Clandestine’ finds were definitely highlights of working on the project. But aside from using my Spanish and learning all about mid-twentieth century Spanish art and its political context, I also really enjoyed interacting with and learning all about the National Trust, and the wider heritage sector. The internship was structured brilliantly, so that every day our supervisor, Alice Purkiss either ran drop-in sessions amongst the interns so we could ask questions about our projects, or meetings with National Trust Staff in curatorial or research team roles. I especially enjoyed meeting with my project co-supervisors Sarah Kay and Laura Bishop, who were so knowledgeable and passionate about the Spanish Gallery at Dudmaston and really helped me get to grips with the project. All in all, this Micro-Internship was an incredible experience where I got to learn all about many amazing things, the most important of which being Spanish Dissident Art and, of course, the National Trust.
Elizabeth Fanning is an undergraduate studying Spanish at St Catherines College, Oxford. Within her degree, she takes a special interest in 20th and 21st Century Argentine literature. Alongside this, she is a lifelong lover of heritage organizations, especially the National Trust, and is looking forward to spending part of her year abroad exploring Spanish galleries in search of more work by the artists displayed in Dudmaston Hall.
Image: Visitors exploring the art galleries at Dudmaston Hall, Shropshire ©National Trust Images/Trevor Ray Hart
