Selma Reuben Holo, director of USC’s Fisher Gallery and graduate Museum Studies Program, with a work by Mir—, one of Spain’s most famous artists.

Photo by Irene Fertik

Nowhere is “the Spanish miracle” – as the transition from Franco’s dictatorship to full-blown democracy has come to be known – more evident than in the country’s museums, argues Selma Holo, director of USC’s Fisher Gallery and graduate Museum Studies Program, in her new book, “Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain.”

Holo has studied Spanish culture since college and has spoken the language since she was a little girl. Still, it wasn’t until 1994, when she won a Fulbright for a year’s study in Spain, that Holo became fully aware of the vigor of Spain’s cultural and political renaissance.

Her last visit to Spain had been in 1975, only six months after Franco’s death. While the hip films of Pedro Almodóvar and the success of the Barcelona Olympics had suggested change, Holo was unprepared to find a nation so utterly transformed.

“I never expected to see that the whole population – much of which had been born and raised during the Franco regime – seemed to have completely redefined itself as lifelong democrats. Everyone acted and talked as if they had never known any other way of life. Spaniards, who less than 20 years before had felt marginalized by the outside world, now considered themselves to be cosmopolitans, participants and insiders,” writes Holo in the book’s preface.

Then Holo noticed what she notices best – the museums. They had proliferated, in striking variety.

“The museums offered me a way, a methodology, for understanding the new Spain,” said Holo. “They are symbols of a people’s place in society and can be powerful generators of civic and national identity. These cultural institutions have helped create a profoundly democratic nation – one in which ethnic and regional diversity, once suppressed, is not only tolerated but celebrated and openly marketed.”

Holo offered a trenchant example. An advertising campaign in Catalonia, the northeast region of Spain, goes something like this: “Come to Barcelona [Catalonia’s chief city] and visit not one country, but two.”

“Such a slogan would have been impossible in Franco’s time, when the propaganda machine was busy mythologizing Spanish cultural unity,” said Holo. “The Spaniards have taken what was considered a deficit and raised it to the level of national asset.”

The nation has learned lessons from the often painful chapters of its history and moved on.

“Spaniards have rejected the politics of vengeance,” said Holo. “They have figured out a way to balance memory and forgetting.”

Taking a panoptic view of Spain’s museums – from Madrid’s Prado (a.k.a. “The Magnificent Invalid”) to small institutions in the least likely and hospitable of corners – Holo’s book offers case study after case study testifying to “the Spanish miracle.”

Witness the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by USC alumnus Frank Gehry and situated in the heart of the Basque region, long ravaged by its separatist movements. The Basques were arguably the country’s most poorly treated group during the Franco regime. After the dictator’s death, a period of terror ensued. If the Basque country was on the global map, it was as a scene of violence and retribution.

“A pact of tolerance and of simultaneous autonomy/participation seems to have evolved since democracy was fully established,” said Holo, “and the Guggenheim Bilbao, the museum most familiar to Americans aside from the venerable Prado, attests to the pact’s validity and strength.”

Designed by an American (a choice Spanish politicians made quite consciously), the museum is entirely a Basque production – with no central government involvement at all. Yet, as Holo said, “We all know it’s in Spain.”

An affirmation of Basque identity as well as a titanium, glass, stone and steel monument to Spain’s cosmopolitan character, the Guggenheim Bilbao is credited with defusing the terrorism of old. Within a year of the museum’s opening, when the world’s eyes turned to the city, the separatist group ETA publicly renounced violence.

Spain is once again identifying itself as a plural nation, Holo said. And in the city of Toledo – home of the Sephardic Museum – the reversal has been revolutionary.

Toledo was once famous for its convivencia, the “living together” of Catholics, Jews and Muslims (Moors). That was before the horrors of the Inquisition “cleansed” all but observant Catholics for centuries to come. But when the city’s mayor was asked recently why he, a non-Jew, was committed to the restoration of the Synagogue of Samuel He-Levy, he replied: “Because we’re all Jews in Toledo.”

“Only with the advent of democracy has Spain been able to celebrate the contributions of ‘the other,’” Holo said. “Putting another chink in the Francoist sense of the monolithic ‘us,’ the central government has revived Jewish culture and acknowledged its contributions to the nation.”

Similarly remarkable testaments to the nation’s fine balance between memory and forgetting are MEIAC – a detention center turned art museum – and the military museums that continue to preserve memories of Franco and his victory in the Spanish civil war.

MEIAC, or the Extremaduran and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art, is housed in an old Francoist prison. Instead of demolishing the building, which towers over the city that saw one of the era’s worst massacres, the Spaniards have – with a keen sense of irony – turned the past on its ear. Where the nonconformists and transgressives were once sent for severe punishment, they are now sent for exhibition.

And the military museums?

“Their walls are hung with idealized images of El Caudillo, who is still venerated by a rapidly disappearing old guard,” said Holo. “I was stunned until I realized how truly phenomenal this is. A democracy allows it. In a democracy, even awful things can be said.”

Holo believes there’s a lesson in “the Spanish miracle” for all democracies, the United States not excepted.

“We can and must learn from Spain’s example,” she said. “We must question our own time-honored myths, learn from them, and move on.”