Two of the panels from Quintanilla’s “Don Quixote Frescoes” feature modern settings for Quixote, left, and Sancho Panza. (photo by Steve Paul)
At a time when a reckless, small-minded assault spreads like a virus over the arts and humanities, threatening the existence of much-cherished endeavors and institutions, we must remain grateful for small pleasures and achievements.
That’s how I was feeling anyway the last time I walked down from the second-floor landing at UMKC’s Haag Hall. I had just paid a second visit to two Spanish art conservators as they were completing a project to restore the frescoes that have lined the walls of that space for nearly 85 years.
Once again, Iñaki Gárate Llombart was at floor level attending to details in the lower regions of the extraordinary artwork, and Beatriz del Ordi stood and squatted on a scaffolding to work on the upper sections.
“We have to finish today,” Gárate told me, “because we’re going back to Spain tomorrow.” They had it well in hand.
I’ve long maintained that this campus-bound artwork is one of the most interesting hidden gems of Kansas City’s cultural landscape.
The work, sprawling over six individual, narrative panels is titled “The Don Quixote Frescoes” and familiarly known as “Don Quixote in the Modern World.” It was made by Luis Quintanilla (1893-1978), a Spanish artist in exile in the U.S. in the period following his country’s civil war. The war shattered his nation from 1936 to 1939, presaged World War II, and led to the ascension of the decades-long, dictatorial rule of Gen. Francisco Franco.
Quintanilla made his only other known fresco for the Spanish pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, but it wasn’t put on display (global politics, of course). The multi-sectioned mural was lost for the next half century until being rediscovered (in the back room of a Manhattan porn theater, as the fascinating story goes) and sent to post-Franco Spain, where it eventually was restored and installed at the University of Cantabria. So the frescoes here have unique status in the U.S.
Although the official documentation is said to be lost, Quintanilla was invited to spend the academic year 1940-1941 at what was then known as the University of Kansas City, under a Rockefeller Foundation program aiding displaced scholars and artists. He spent weeks devising his scheme and making realist sketches of students, faculty members and locals (even a Missouri mule), whose figures and faces he used to populate the six scenes presenting Don Quixote and sidekick Sancho Panza in humorous, allegorical and clearly anti-fascist scenes. The university’s arts-conscious chancellor, Clarence R. Decker, had suggested the Don Quixote theme. As Quintanilla proceeded, he transferred the sketches into paintings layered onto the meticulous, wet-plaster foundation of the traditional fresco process.
Although I was a UMKC student many moons ago, I never really took proper interest in the Haag Hall murals, which I must have walked by innumerable times. It was only much later, when I learned of Quintanilla’s longtime friendship with Ernest Hemingway, that my interest accelerated. Hemingway and his new bride Martha Gellhorn even passed through the city in November 1940 and spent a rollicking evening with Quintanilla and his wife.
Another astounding coincidence arose several years ago after Julián Zugazagoitia, CEO of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, took a look at the frescoes and was astounded to find that Quintanilla had visibly dedicated the work to the museum director’s grandfather. Also named Julián Zugazagoitia, his grandfather had been Spain’s minister of information and a friend of Quintanilla, and after the fascist victory that ended the civil war, he was assassinated.
More than five years ago, on the eve of the COVID shutdown, I sat alongside the Nelson’s Zugazagoitia during a presentation about the murals by a Spanish art historian, Esther Lopez Sobrado, and Iñaki Gárate, the conservator. Gárate had gained Quintanilla experience in 2007 when he worked to conserve the other frescoes in Spain. Those have received cultural-heritage status and are familiarly known as the “other Guernicas,” a reference to Pablo Picasso’s indelible canvas, “Guernica,” commemorating the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
In 2020, the Spaniards inspected the UMKC murals and recommended a project to clean and repair them. Of course, the pandemic got in the way, and funding was not forthcoming. Viviana Grieco, a UMKC professor of history, worked with others for years to find a solution. She eventually found a way to include restoration of the murals in a grant application involving numerous cultural projects, under an umbrella initiative known as the Kansas City Monuments Coalition, to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
It worked. The Mellon Foundation funds — an undisclosed fraction of the overall grant of $4 million — made it possible for Gárate and del Ordi to spend a month over the summer in Haag Hall.
The frescoes were in quite good condition, Gárate said, showing little in the way of structural decay or damage. The murals had actually been conserved in the 1990s, though accepted processes have changed since then and prompted the team to tweak and remove some of the earlier over-painting. And they also had to treat some gaps they found above and below some places in the plaster foundation.
Gárate and del Ordi began by cleaning all the surfaces, using distilled water and thin Japanese paper to remove accumulated grime and making the colorful works appear fresh and ready to pop off the wall. More days of touching up scrapes with fine-pointed brushes and fresh watercolor pigments followed.
Over time, Grieco has helped guide students to corral the history of the murals, even identifying and tracking down Kansas Citians who served as Quintanilla’s models and were still alive to share their stories. A website devoted to the project was in the process of being updated, Grieco told me, and the university planned to reintroduce its polished treasures sometime this fall.
Small steps, but a mighty fine art story in our midst.
UMKC presents a free lecture about the murals by Patrick Lenaghan, Ph.D., at 6 p.m. Oct. 13 in Room 111 of UMKC Royall Hall, 800 E. 52nd St., followed by a conversation and guided tour of the murals by Lenaghan and Quintanilla scholar Christine Kierig. Parking is free on levels four and five of the Rockhill Parking Garage. Refreshments with be served.
For more, see our previous column about the murals.
