Images of the tourist city: Visions from Spain

The resurgence in 1970s Spanish painting of the Mediterranean aesthetic (at least as a topic of a debate) entailed a utopian vision of the tourist city. The promise of tourism development permeated the realist (or ‘committed’, as it was called at the time) paintings when the artists used the opportunity to trade the sordid imagery of the previous decades for an imaginary evoking pleasure and warmth and suggesting a new urban utopia. This article overviews various versions of this utopia: from the images of the Mediterranean by Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Equipo Crónica to the impacts of art museums on urban development, from Cuenca to Bilbao.