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On the second floor of Haag Hall on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus, at the top of a stairwell, six brightly colored frescos show a surreal series of images: crowds of people, some with contorted limbs or distorted faces, some holding farm animals or food, some with birds perched on their heads.
A man on a ladder pours water onto a man’s head. Another man lifts a cloth to show a hippo-like monster with dozens of people inside its mouth, while disinterested crowds ignore them.
Completed by Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla in 1941, the mural is known as “Don Quixote in the Modern World.” It’s one of only two surviving murals by the artist, and the only one in its original location.
Quintanilla came to the university as a rising artist with successful exhibitions in Europe, who hung out with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Eleanor Roosevelt. He had escaped the Spanish Civil War, fleeing a burgeoning fascist regime that would rule Spain for decades to come.
Much of Quintanilla’s work was destroyed in bombings and purged by the fascists. As a result, he has largely been forgotten.
But a recent restoration of the UMKC mural this past summer aims to cement Quintanilla’s legacy in the art world — and broadcast his warnings about authoritarianism and the fragility of democracy.
A new life for ‘Don Quixote’
This year, the Mellon Foundation awarded a $4 million grant to UMKC to restore 16 historic sites, including the Quintanilla murals.
The university hired two experts who traveled from Spain and spent July cleaning and retouching the frescos.
Restorer Iñaki Garate Llombart said the works were in good shape because they had been previously retouched in the 1990s. But 80 years of weather and sunlight had taken their toll, especially on the two panels of the mural that flank a window.
“That corner is more easy to be affected by humidity and by the contrast of temperature between winter and summer, between outside and inside,” he said.
Garate Llombart and his colleague, Beatriz del Ordi, also had to clean up the impacts of human activities in the busy passageway, like smoking, graffiti and scratches. Decades of dust and dirt had formed a film on the surface.
The pair applied a thin paper to the surface of the fresco with wet brushes to remove dirt. After the cleaning process was done, they carefully reapplied paint to places where color had faded.
“We use watercolor, putting [it] only in these places, and respecting everything original,” said del Ordi.
The mural is a buon fresco, a painting technique that was especially popular during the Italian Renaissance, where plaster is applied to a wall and painted while still fresh. Examples of the technique are rare in the United States, said Garate Llombart.
“You have a piece of Spanish history here,” he said.
Quintanilla’s life
So how did such a piece of history end up in Kansas City? It’s a story of tragedy, one of thousands that emerged from one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century.
Quintanilla was born in 1893 in Santander, on the northern coast of Spain. He began teaching himself how to paint when he was 16, and went to Paris when he was 18 to further his artistic education.
In the 1910s and ’20s, Paris was in the middle of an artistic boom. The city helped cultivate art movements like cubism and surrealism. And it was home to artists like Hemingway and Picasso, who crossed paths with the young Quintanilla.
“That was a time for learning, and also for a lot of love stories and a lot of partying and bohemian life,” said UMKC professor Alberto Villamandos.
Throughout the ’20s, Quintanilla moved around Europe, learning new techniques and growing his reputation. He learned how to paint frescos in Italy, and eventually settled in Madrid.
In 1930, he joined the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, which later commissioned him to paint murals for the party’s meeting hall. Quintanilla also completed murals at Madrid’s modern art museum and a memorial to socialist leader Pablo Iglesias. And he drew further attention from the art world when he exhibited a series of engravings of Madrid street life.
But as Quintanilla’s career grew, a period of political tumult took over Spain.
In 1931, the country elected its second Republican government, and King Alfonso XIII went into exile. A coalition of groups like communists, socialists and anarchists supported Spain’s new democracy.
But the Republicans were opposed by a right-wing coalition of Nationalists, which included Catholics, monarchists, and other conservative groups. They rallied behind a fascist ideology invested in ethnic purity, military power and jingoism, and eventually promoted General Francisco Franco to be their leader.
“The Spanish Civil War is, in a way, an introduction to what the Second World War would be between these two extremes, these two poles,” Villamandos said.
In 1936, the Nationalists launched a violent rebellion against the Republicans, which eventually exploded into the Spanish Civil War. An estimated 500,000 people died in battle or due to mass political violence.
Like many other artists in Spain, Quintanilla supported the Republicans.
“He always showed support to the underdogs,” Villamandos said. “I think he had a strong sense of social justice.”
Quintanilla led battles against Franco’s army, and even served eight months in prison for his affiliation with the Socialist Party. During this period, much of his work was destroyed in bombings. Killings and torture awaited intellectuals and artists who went against the Nationalists.
“That was not a time to be neutral in the country,” said Villamandos.
In January 1939, Quintanilla left for the U.S. on a diplomatic passport — his mission was to deliver a set of engravings by Spanish artist Francisco Goya to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. That same year, the Nationalists won the civil war, and Franco came into power as a dictator.
“Had he stayed in Spain, he would have been killed in a firing squad,” Villamandos said. “He would have been executed.”
Quintanilla wouldn’t return to Spain for nearly 40 years.
‘In the heartland of this strange new land’
After fleeing Spain, Quintanilla settled in New York City, where he reunited with Jan Speirs, an American woman he had previously dated in Spain. The two got married and had a son, Paul.
Quintanilla spent time in Hollywood and met Thomas Hart Benton, a fellow muralist and one of Kansas City’s most famous artists.
UMKC at the time was known as the University of Kansas City. Then-university president Clarence Decker wanted to grow arts and culture on campus, so he established an artist-in-residence program. He invited Quintanilla to be its first participant.
Quintanilla arrived in the fall of 1940, and began teaching painting, giving lectures and working on a new mural project in Haag Hall. He saw the move as an opportunity to support his family, away from the violence he had escaped, and which was still roiling Europe.
“This could be the solution, here in the heartland of this strange new land, where he could teach and paint and be left alone, finally, to develop his art, to master his aesthetic far from the awful interruptions of the world,” wrote Paul Quintanilla in “Waiting at the Shore,” a 2014 biography of his father.
The painter based his mural project on the 17th-century novel “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, one of the most famous works of western literature and a foundational part of Spanish culture. Quintanilla trained facilities staff at UMKC to help him execute the fresco technique he had learned in Italy.
And for the characters in the mural, including the deluded windmill-fighting knight Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza, he used university students and staff as models. Chris Wolff, UMKC’s campus historian, said that Quintanilla stood at the window of Haag Hall and grabbed people who caught his attention.
“He didn't speak English very well, but he would kind of, with gestures, have them pose, and he would sketch them to put them in the mural,” Wolff said.
Then-contemporary figures made it into the work, too – like the dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Quintanilla also painted his family: himself in a sombrero, to show his Spanish identity, and his son in a fedora, to show that he was an American.
The end result was six panels depicting Don Quixote and Sancho Panza wearing contemporary clothing, in three different settings: the 20th century, an “ideal world,” and the “real world.” At the time, students didn’t know what to make of Quintanilla’s modernist creation.
“When they saw Quintanilla's art, it was very shocking to them,” Wolff said. “They would write openly in the campus newspaper about how, ‘oh gosh, all the girls in the mural look fat.’”
Quintanilla’s style in some panels recalls the bright colors and iconography of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, said Villamandos. Other panels, however, take up the modernist mission of rejecting traditional ideas of beauty and virtue.
“He was drawing from other more extreme or more expressionistic trends that were happening in the ’30s, pre-Second World War,” Villamandos said. “And also traditions that were coming from the early 19th century, which is the grotesque style of Francisco Goya.”
A major theme explored in the paintings is exile — an experience commonly associated with “Don Quixote” because Cervantes spent years of his life in exile and in prison.
Quintanilla was among thousands of left-wing activists, intellectuals and other refugees who left Spain to escape Franco’s fascist government. And many of them felt a strong connection to Cervantes’ novel, said UMKC professor Viviana Grieco.
”It's a very big theme among all the Spanish,” Grieco said. “And it's not just in painting. You see it in literature, you see it in all kinds of artistic expressions.”
But unlike others who settled in Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Argentina, Quintanilla ended up in the United States, without other Spanish exiles or refugees around him.
“Quintanilla is very alone here. He doesn’t have a community,” Grieco said. “It’s a completely different exile experience that Quintanilla had.”
Decker and Quintanilla couldn’t reach an agreement about spending another year in the residency program. So after one school year, Quintanilla and his family left Kansas City — and the mural — behind.
He spent time in New York and eventually returned to Paris, painting portraits, working for magazines and illustrating books.
When Franco died in 1975, Spain began to transition back to democracy. A year later, Quinttanilla finally returned to Spain, after nearly four decades away from his home country. He died in Madrid in 1978.
A mural in the modern world
For more than 80 years, thousands of students have walked by the “Don Quixote” mural on their way to class or office hours. And on a recent fall day, shortly after the completion of the restoration and the start of the semester, many students said they found Quintanilla’s artistic choices striking.
But they weren’t sure how to interpret its meaning.
“A lot of the anatomy is contorted,” said Rebecca Hayes, a senior majoring in studio art. “It almost looks like their faces are real and then the rest of the body looks like stuffed dummies.”
“Don Quixote in the Modern World” reflects Quintanilla’s experience living under, and later escaping, an authoritarian regime. It references the ongoing World War, and the rise of fascism across Europe.
One panel shows Adolf Hitler lifting up a cloth to show a monster with scenes of war and imprisonment in its mouth — while people around them look the other way.
“It’s obvious that this is an image from a horror movie,” Villamandos said.
"This is a warning," he continued. "Quintanilla was giving a warning of what may be coming to the U.S. This monster of dictatorship or fascism that is bringing death, is bringing war."
The mural’s message has only grown more relevant, says Julián Zugazagoitia, director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
”These murals should make us think, first of all, of the horrors of war,” he said, “and also about the notions of displacement.”
Zugazagoitia has a surprising personal connection to the “Don Quixote” murals, which sit just a short distance away from the Nelson-Atkins.
His grandfather, also named Julián Zugazagoitia, was a socialist politician and writer in Spain — who ended up in jail right next to Quintanilla.
Quintanilla actually drew portraits of Zugazagoitia and his other friends in prison. But unlike the painter, Zugazagoitia didn’t make it out of Spain.
In November 1940, while Quintanilla was teaching and painting in Kansas City, Zugazagoitia was executed by the Franco government. The rest of his family escaped Spain and settled in Mexico, where his grandson — the younger Julián Zugazagoitia — was born.
The younger Zugazagoitia lived in Paris, New York and other cities, and eventually accepted a job at the Nelson-Atkins in 2010. Before he left New York, he attended an exhibition of Quintanilla’s paintings, where, completely by coincidence, Zugazagoitia met the painter’s son.
Paul Quintanilla told Julián Zugazagoitia that there was a mural by his father in Kansas City.
A few years later, after settling into his new city and job, Zugazagoitia finally found the time to look for the mural. When he finally walked into Haag Hall, the museum director noticed an inscription written in one corner: “A la memoria de Julián Zugazagoitia.”
The mural was dedicated to his late grandfather.
“It felt like an embrace of my personal history, in saying, ‘You are at the right place,’” Zugazagoitia said.
As authoritarianism rises once again around the world, and the United States experiences its own anti-immigrant backlash and limitations on free speech, Zugazagoitia sees in “Don Quixote in the Modern World” a reminder that the talents and experiences of immigrants and refugees make the world better.
”That mural represents,” Zugazagoitia said, “the hope that people recognize that those kinds of migration patterns are things that enrich our culture.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Nomin Ujiyediin and produced and mixed by Mackenzie Martin, with editing by Suzanne Hogan and Gabe Rosenberg.
