The 2024 David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture by Claudia Hopkins (Professor of Art History at Edinburgh
College of Art, University of Edinburgh), Centre for Visual Cultures, Royal Holloway, 19 November 2024.
The fourteenth anniversary David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture entitled “From Ethnographic to Camp
Orientalism: Gabriel Morcillo Raya" was delivered by Claudia Hopkins, Professor of Art History at Edinburgh
College of Art, University of Edinburgh. She was introduced by Sarah Wright, Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway. The Vote of Thanks was given by Dr Naomi Lebens, Head of Royal Holloway Cultural Services and College Curator.
In this lecture Prof Hopkins shows how Gabriel Morcillo Raya (1887-1973), inspired by the multicultural history of his native Granada, 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. Prof Hopkins examines his social and artistic networks, his patrons and audiences, drawing comparisons with other
figures whose work also created new spaces for male subjectivity. She asks what were the underlying impulses and
meanings of Morcillo’s iconographies, considering, on the one hand, the societal attitudes to homosexuality at
the time, and, on the other, the self-orientalising notion of a Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood that prevailed
in colonial rhetoric and Andalucismo.