Spain and the Hispanic World review: An elegant, old-fashioned dive into identity

This plainly titled exhibition induces a strange sense of being trapped in another era. And that era isn’t one of the actual historical periods covered in the show’s fascinating assortment of treasures from New York’s Hispanic Society Museum and Library – be it Spain’s 16th century Golden Age or colonial Mexico. It’s more a feeling of being transported back to an older and simpler period of exhibition-making. First there’s the very plainness of that title, redolent more of some arid 1950s textbook than the kind of sexy, crowd-pulling show the Royal Academy needs in these desperately straitened times.

That impression is compounded by a certain basicness in the show’s layout and design. Four millennia’s worth of artefacts – from Neolithic pottery to Impressionist painting via substantial works by Velasquez, Goya and El Greco – are laid out chronologically in a succession of dark-walled rooms. This “visual narrative of the history of Spanish culture” is elegant enough but a shade old-fashioned, with little of the contextualisation in terms of colonialism and stylistic appropriation you’d expect in these “politically” obsessed times. I felt at moments as though I was marooned in some old-school decorative arts museum, say the V&A, in a time, say the 1970s, before museums felt obliged to present themselves as designed experiences: when it was enough simply to put interesting stuff in a room and leave it up to the visitor to take it or leave it.

Nonetheless, there’s more than enough here I’d be extremely happy to take, and that’s well worth going out of your way to see. Often it’s the more unexpected works that are most revealing, and a degree of quaintness in the presentation suits their provenance.

Founded in 1910 by millionaire philanthropist Archer M Huntington and housed in an imposing Beaux Arts mansion in upper Manhattan, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library comprises the most extensive collection of Spanish and Hispanic art outside Spain. Currently under refurbishment and free to lend its riches around the world, the museum reflects to this day the passions of its founder.

A collection of silver Celtic spiral bracelets and torques, from the celebrated Palencia hoard, unearthed in a Spanish village in 1911, billed as the Hispanic Society’s most precious holding, are oddly lacking in atmosphere – though that tends to be the way with highly polished objects. But a fabulous array of renaissance doorknockers in the form of mythical beasts and birds has just the kind of narrow obsessive focus that only the inspired amateur collector can bring to a museum.

The wall texts talk, a touch complacently, about the diverse religious and cultural influences that have “shaped and enriched Spanish culture”, evoking a dated notion of a “Hispanic world”, comprising most of Central and South America, that serves – in this view – as a cultural appendage to its former colonial power. Yet the most exciting objects here are ones that contest, indeed threaten, to explode the notions of Spanish or even “Hispanic” culture altogether.

There are richly patterned textiles from the Moorish kingdom of Granada dating as far back as 1300, a time when most of Spain was solidly Muslim – all extraordinarily well preserved. But even more fascinating is the way “Islamic design” continued for centuries after the Christian reconquest of Spain. This is particularly apparent in the show’s copious medieval ceramics, as Arab craftsmen converted to Christianity and continued their traditional styles with the most cursory attempts to accommodate Christian imagery. A large ceramic font from Toledo, created in 1400, three centuries after the fall of the Muslim city, prominently displays the cross and the insignia IHS, representing Jesus, but is almost completely “Islamic” in its green and white colouring and geometric design.

A richly lacquered 17th century Mexican writing desk is European in structure with its arrangement of fiddly drawers, but feels pure Aztec in the mass of decorative figures and geometric elements crowding its lustrous surface. An enormous lacquered “batea” or tray is covered in red and gold concentric patterns that mix indigenous forms with “Spanish” design elements that are fundamentally Islamic in origin. These are marvellous examples of appropriative fusion, which make us question who – the indigenous craftsmen or the European patron – is calling the aesthetic shots.

More troubling is a painting of a Mexican mestizo (mixed race) family (1715) with the legend “Mestizo and Indian Produce Coyote”. It’s an early example of a “casta” (or caste) painting, reflecting, we are told, the Spanish colonists’ obsession with racial purity. Yet it’s the exuberant cultural impurity of many of its exhibits that provides this exhibition’s best moments.

A display of Ecuadorean wooden figures of saints could pass at a glance for European, even German, workmanship. But beyond the bland expressions, their fierce colour and energy feel animistic, as though some indigenous deity lurked within the carapace of Christian piety, which is exactly the way the syncretic “fusion” religions of the Americas, such as Cuban santeria and Brazilian candomblé, have survived and thrived till today.

Beside these vigorous cultural collisions, the examples of proper Spanish art – even the portraits by Goya and Velazquez – feel a touch cold and static. The best of the paintings, Goya’s full-length portrait of the Duchess of Alba, with whom the artist reputedly enjoyed a relationship, is a great but disconcertingly ambiguous image. Rather than passion, the duchess’s wide-eyed, slightly blank expression exudes a sense of sceptical detachment, as though neither artist nor subject are sure what to make of each other.

In the last room, Joaquin Sorolla’s slick early 20th century impressionism is offset by his contemporary Ignacio Zuloaga’s large-scale, art nouveau-tinged images of gypsy bullfighters, popular entertainers and rustic religious processions. They are evidence of the fact that for all its proud Catholic chauvinism, Spain has always looked to its contested cultural periphery – to gypsies, the Islamic world and the Americas – for its sense of inner identity.

Spain and the Hispanic World runs at RA from January 21 until April 20