From ethnographic to camp Orientalism: Gabriel Morcillo Raya

Claudia Hopkins
Professor of Art History at Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh

Inspired by the multicultural history of his native Granada, Gabriel Morcillo Raya (1887-1973) created extraordinary ‘camp’ images featuring semi-nude, predominantly male models posing theatrically with oriental or classical accessories, flaunting their queerness to the viewer. A contemporary of Federico García Lorca, Manuel de Falla, and Pablo Picasso, Morcillo exists outside the modernist canon and is little known today. Nevertheless, he enjoyed a successful career. His homoerotic paintings were even shown in official exhibitions at the Venice Biennale in the 1920s and later in Nazi Germany. Rather than viewing Morcillo as an isolated figure or merely as a precursor to postmodern luminaries such as Robert Mapplethorpe, this lecture situates his work within the context of his own era and Spanish Orientalism. It examines his social and artistic networks, his patrons and audiences, drawing comparisons with other figures whose work also created new spaces for male subjectivity. What were the underlying impulses and meanings of Morcillo’s iconographies, considering, on one hand, the societal attitudes to homosexuality at the time and, on the other, the self-orientalizing notion of a Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood that prevailed in colonial rhetoric and Andalucismo? 

The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Picture Gallery.

David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture

Admission is free but booking is essential; please email centreforvisualcultures@royalhollloway.ac.uk

Image: Moors by Gabriel Morcillo Raya, c. 1920-40 (oil on canvas, 100 x 124 cm, private collection). It shows two young, semi-nude male figures seated closely together sporting brightly patterned turbans: the left figure is holding a large tray of fruit, the other is cradling a green terracotta vase.