PRESERVED in a 1917 sketchbook of Picasso's is a cutting from a Spanish newspaper which reports a mention of the artist- 'nuestro Pablo Picasso' - in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE.' Clive Bell had referred to the thirty-six year old painter as a 'master' and later in the year the Magazine published his Portrait of Gertrude Stein. It is easy to forget how such endorsements, appearing in a journal of serious scholarship, must have been a red rag to many of its readers and con- tributors, who felt that Picasso should find no apologists in its mandarin pages; the following year, D.S. MacColl was allowed to voice the more generally-held view that the works of Picasso were 'insignificant'. Such see-saw opinion should be considered within the context of violent debate athe time on the merits not only of the latest Paris lions but on such immediate forebears as Cezanne and Van Gogh.

Divergent assessments of contemporary artists are inevi- table; it is the changing fortunes of earlier ones that are often surprising. El Greco is a case in point. In a 1918 letter to the Editor, the distorted figuration of Cizanne and younger modernists is adversely contrasted with that of 'inspired primitives' and the 'good-bad drawing' of El Greco. By 1918, to place El Greco alongside 'inspired primitives' was certainly a reactionary judgement. But, considering how relatively new was the re-evaluation of his work, it was not uncommon. The acceptance by the National Gallery in 1895 of a gift of El Greco's Christ driving the traders from the temple marked the official, if shaky, reversal of his critical standing, in England at least. The barometer of his reputation remained volatile for some years. Sir Charles Holmes, in his memoirs, recalls the difficulties he had as Director of the National Gallery in persuading the trustees to purchase the Agony in the garden in 1919; only Lord Curzon's reluctant but decisive vote resulted in its acquisition, one which caused enormous discussion in the press, and crowds in the Gallery when it was hung. 2

The documentation of El Greco and other Spanish masters was only fitfully represented in the earlier years of the Magazine. Contacts with scholars in Spain were slender. Reproductions of work by Spanish artists were in the main confined to collections outside their native country - Velizquez in Vienna (July 1904), for example, and works by Zubarin and Goya owned by Dr Carvallo in Paris. Articles kept to the best-known names, with lesser figures mentioned almost as exotics 'whose undoubted abilities' should 'repay further study' or who 'deserve a fuller recognition than has hitherto been accorded them.' Painters such as Ribera and Ribalta are virtually un- represented. An exception to the cautiously familiar was Jose Pijoan's revelatory article on Catalan romanesque wall paintings (1911), illustrating work which must have appeared uncannily contemporary to those who were then beginning to look at the world through Post-Impressionist eyes (see also this issue, p.99).

Increasing contacts with Spain after the First War, combined with the personal enthusiasm for Hispanic cul- ture of the editor, R.R. Tatlock, culminated in a major publication, Spanish Art (1927), issued by the BURLINGTON as a separate monograph. Surveying the whole range of Spanish achievement from architecture and painting to gothic iron door knockers and eighteenth-century porcelain figurines, the book is now chiefly remarkable for its huge quantity of illustrations.

The Civil War followed by World War II reduced to a minimum the coverage of art-historical discoveries in Spain. In an attempt to redress the balance, the Magazine ran a whole (but admittedly thin, post-war) issue in December 1945 on Spanish art with articles on Velizquez, El Greco, Zurbarin and Goya. This resumption of ties was prefaced by a plea from FJ. S~inchez Cant6n, then Assistant Director of the Prado, that more space be given to Spanish subjects in this 'veteran British magazine'. Since 1936 and 'the tragic succession of wars', the BURLINGTON, he wrote, was a reassuring monthly presence for Spanish scholars and curators, otherwise lacking in information from abroad in a period bereft of'normal interchange'. Thereafter a larger number of contributions appeared, extending into the twentieth century with the work of Picasso, Gris and Mir6. Nearly all were by British and American writers, several of whom made the 1964 number devoted to Goya an outstanding issue.

Since the earliest days of the BURLINGTON to the present, one name in particular has recurred in connexion with the art of Spain. Lionel Harris sold El Greco's Agony in the garden to the National Gallery; he was the pre-eminent London dealer in Spanish art with a spectacular, changing stock of paintings, sculpture and woodwork. In 1913, for example, he had on show two El Grecos which inspired one of Roger Fry's finest appreciations.3 Harris's son, Tomis, also a celebrated London dealer and collector ofSpanish art, appeared in these pages as a painter as well as the author of'by far the most important work on Goya in recent times' (Goya: Engravings and Lithographs, 1966). His sister, Enriqueta, first published on Spanish art in the Magazine in 1938 and the most recent of her many, funda- mental contributions appears on p.125. Her achievements as a scholar will be recognised, in this her eightieth year, by the award of a Medalla de Oro al mirito en las bellas artes from the King of Spain. We dedicate to her, with gratitude, this latest special issue on Spanish art.