“Culture must be the great asset of tourism. This is where Spain gives everything”

The result, for example, is his latest work “A Thousand Eyes Hide the Night” (Espasa, 2024), an immersion in a Paris occupied by the Nazis where artists try to survive. His writings helped the author to investigate, based on the documentation found, “a forgotten heritage wealth” that he is trying to bring to light.

This will be the objective of his intervention from 7:45 p.m. at the Library of Castilla y León, in Valladolid. He offers to discover “a world of painters and sculptors who do not know each other”. He gives the example of Mateo Hernández, a man from Bejarano with a “unique personality” who lived in the “Mecca of the arts” for 30 years when it was occupied, “a magnificent sculptor who seems very sad to me that he “is not a big name in our sculpture.” . He blames the “canon” imposed by Modernity for the fact that his work has gone unnoticed until today, “in my opinion, because of the false conviction that the avant-garde was good art and that traditional art was bad, outdated. He therefore believes that “all the artistic, literary and intellectual canons of the 19th and 20th centuries should be revised”.

It wasn’t just the cannon. This era of occupied Paris was dark and “the vast majority” of these artists “had to do less than brilliant things” which they then had to hide: “Obviously, when we go through difficult situations, we do things that we regret”, recalls the author of “The Tempest”. , who insists on the fact that “it would be good to expose this “conjunction of dissimulations” to the open because “there are very precious people”. At that time he remembers that Baltasar Lobo de Zamora was beginning to emerge, but for Juan Manuel de Prada “the most painful forgetting” is the artist Federico Beltrán Masses, “a sort of Julio Romero de Torres with decadent European influences who seems to me to be an extraordinary painter.”

In his lecture, the author will also discuss the prolific business of counterfeiting works during the occupation of Paris, in which several Spanish artists were also involved. “The most famous of all, and what has been proven, was the Canarian Óscar Domínguez, who made perfect forgeries of Picasso and Chirico, then the two most sought-after contemporary painters.” He will also remember “the cell of forgers commanded by César González-Ruano”, among whom was Manuel Viola, “who would later become a highly appreciated abstract expressionist in the 1950s and 1960s”.

To shed light on the lives of these unknown creators, De Prada had to compile enormous documentation in the archives. The value of these centers will be highlighted within the framework of AR-PA Cultural Tourism, which is taking place for the first time at the Valladolid Exhibition Center at the same time as the International Domestic Tourism Fair (Intur). Its role is also underlined by the writer: “I discovered a lot about these artists in the archives, unthinkable things because the image you have of it or that has been handed down to us is often self-interested or simply incomplete. The archives immerse you in the heart of the lives of the people you want to bring back to the present.

Likewise, AR-PA will analyze the challenges of cultural heritage and how it can be used to attract tourism and economic resources. In this regard, Juan Manuel de Prada believes that to date Spain “has not, coincidentally, exploited its greatest assets. “Artistically, we are unbeatable (…) I am not saying that we must eliminate seaside tourism, but we must transform it into something else and the epicenter of this other thing must be our artistic heritage,” he says. and justifies: “Culture must be at the center because this is where Spain keeps its promises.” As an example, he cites his beloved Zamora, “a delight for the lover of Romanesque art”.