2017
José Luis Colomer, Blanca Pons-Sorolla, and Mark A. Roglán, eds.
Winner

Sorolla in America: Friends and Patrons
Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University; New York: Center for Spain in America, with the collaboration of the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica; Madrid: Fundación Museo Sorolla, 2015
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) enjoyed widespread fame in America’s Gilded Age, when museums contended to host his solo exhibitions in 1909 and 1911, and the purchase of his paintings was a matter of pride for public and private collections. This volume studies the web of personal relationships that underlay this collective fascination for Sorolla, the most admired Spanish artist outside Spain in the early twentieth century.
Several types of figures played a significant part in this success story: Sorolla’s first buyers in the United States, who introduced the Spanish artist to America by displaying their purchases in public view; the directors of the nascent art museums of St. Louis, Buffalo, and Chicago, who organized the blockbuster Sorolla exhibitions and the social events related to the artist’s presence in these cities; key collectors and supporters, such as Archer M. Huntington—who not only hosted Sorolla’s legendary New York exhibition at the Hispanic Society, but also bore the main expenses of his triumphant American tour—, and Thomas Fortune Ryan, his second greatest fan in America, who owned at least 29 paintings by the Spanish master. Another group of characters in our story is made up of American artists with whom Sorolla enjoyed personal and professional relationships: mentors or colleagues such as John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase; beginners like Cadwallader L. Washburn and William E.B. Starkweather, who had studied with him at his Madrid studio; Louis Comfort Tiffany sat for Sorolla in 1911, when he was at the pinnacle of his remarkable career as a designer; Raimundo de Madrazo, Sorolla’s predecessor as a portraitist of American High Society in the 1890s.
The group of people featured in this book accounts for a considerable part of the commissions Sorolla worked on in several American cities, as well as the sale of the vast majority of works he brought with him from Spain. The subsequent circulation of these works and the changing appreciation for Sorolla throughout more than a century are examined in the culminating essay: a retrospective study of Sorolla’s fortunes in the art market, which is ultimately a gauge of his international success.
Patton Pamela, ed.
Honorable mention

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America
Leiden: Brill, 2016
Envisioning Others offers a multidisciplinary view of the relationship between race and visual culture in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, from the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal to colonial Peru and Colombia, post-Independence Mexico, and the pre-Emancipation United States. Contributed by specialists in Latin American and Iberian art history, literature, history, and cultural studies, its ten chapters take a transnational view of what ‘race’ meant, and how visual culture supported and shaped this meaning, within the Ibero-American sphere from the late Middle Ages to the modern era. Case studies and regionally-focused essays are balanced by historiographical and theoretical offerings for a fresh perspective that challenges the reader to discern broad intersections of race, color, and the visual throughout the Iberian world.
Contributors are Beatriz Balanta, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Larissa Brewer-García, Ananda Cohen Suarez, Elisa Foster, Grace Harpster, Ilona Katzew, Matilde Mateo, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, and Erin Kathleen Rowe.
Tara Zanardi
Honorable mention

Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016
Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character.
In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.