‘Hotel Florida’ views the Spanish Civil War through six lives

Echoes in KC

Reading Amanda Vaill’s “Hotel Florida,” a thrilling account of the Spanish Civil War, I was reminded of two Kansas City connections, both having to do with art.

One connection was fairly easy to make. Vaill makes passing reference to Julián Zugazagoitia, who was Spain’s minister of the interior during the war years of the 1930s. He is, of course, the grandfather of Julián Zugazagoitia, director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. After Franco’s Nationalist victory in the war, the elder Zugazagoitia was forced to flee to France. Tthe occupying Germans eventually captured him and sent him back to Spain where he was executed in 1940. He wrote a book about the war, published in France the same year.

The other connection is through an exiled Spanish artist named Luis Quintanilla. Ernest Hemingway had befriended Quintanilla in Spain in the early 1930s. Later, Quintanilla spent the school year of 1940-41 as artist in residence at the University of Kansas City (now UMKC). The record of Quintanilla’s stay here can be seen on the second floor of Haag Hall on the campus. It’s a little known but bona fide local treasure: a series of murals Quintanilla painted on a theme of Don Quixote in the modern world.

See images of the Don Quixote murals at this Quintanilla website maintained by his son, Paul Quintanilla.

Hemingway and his new bride, Martha Gellhorn, briefly passed through Kansas City on their way to New York in the fall of 1940, just after the publication of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” They took time to pay a visit with Quintanilla

This story was originally published April 18, 2014 at 11:56 AM with the headline "‘Hotel Florida’ views the Spanish Civil War through six lives."